Dulce et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The New Colossus

by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Scary Movies

by Kim Addonizio

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,  
and I keep expecting some enormous  
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops  
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean  
and drag me from my kitchen  
to the deep cave that flickered  
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless  
between my older brothers, pumped up  
on candy and horror—that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,  
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This  
is how it feels to lose it—

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is  
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.  
I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine—
Hi, I’m not here—
the morning of her funeral,  
the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies  
when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead  
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air  
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me  
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older  
I would know better, and now  
they’re dead, and I’m older,  
and I know better.

Kim Addonizio, “Scary Movies” from What Is This Thing Called Love. Copyright © 2004 by Kim Addonizio. 

The Opposite of Nostalgia

by Eric Gamalinda

You are running away from everyone
who loves you,
from your family,
from old lovers, from friends.

They run after you with accumulations
of a former life, copper earrings,
plates of noodles, banners
of many lost revolutions.

You love to say the trees are naked now
because it never happens
in your country. This is a mystery
from which you will never

recover. And yes, the trees are naked now,
everything that still breathes in them
lies silent and stark
and waiting. You love October most

of all, how there is no word
for so much splendor.
This, too, is a source
of consolation. Between you and memory

everything is water. Names of the dead,
or saints, or history.
There is a realm in which
—no, forget it,

it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
A man drives a stake
through his own heart
and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia

begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
and the leaves take over
and again he has learned
to let go.

Eric Gamalinda, "The Opposite of Nostalgia" from Zero Gravity.  Copyright © 1999 by Eric Gamalinda. 

At the Putney Co-Op, an Opera

by Chard deNiord

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
                                                      —Allen Ginsberg

"Go ahead," I say to my neighbor at the Putney Co-op who tells
     me he can't complain. "Let it out. It's mid-March and there's still
two feet of snow on the ground. Fukushima has just melted down and
the Washington Monument cracked at its pyramidion. Put down your
     bags and sing. How many times dear father, graybeard, lonely old
     courage teacher must you walk down the aisles as a randy eidolon
humming your tunes for us to start? Our song begins in silence and grows
to a buzz. We make it up as we go along, then watch our numbers swell—
     ten thousand members who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Who fly
     like a swarm to join us in our chambers, which are these aisles."

     I'm singing without knowing it, carrying the tune of main things,
     lamenting the prices with Bernie Sanders. My neighbor joins me
for no other reason than singing along as a member of the cast we call
the multitudes of lonely shoppers. I roam the aisles with the sadness
     of America, juggling onions, blessing the beets. It's a local stage on
     which the country opens like a flower that no one sees beside the road.

In my hungry fatigue, I'm shopping for images, which are free on the highest
shelf but costly in their absence—the only ingredient here that heals my sight
     of blindness. I see you, Walt Whitman, pointing your beard toward axis
     mundi by the avocados, reading the labels as if they were lines, weighing
the tomatoes on the scale of your palms, pressing the pears with your thumbs
the way you did in Huntington, Camden, and Brooklyn. And you, also, Ruth
     and Hayden, at the checkout counter with empty bags you claim are full
     of apples, almonds, and bananas. What can you say to those outside who
haven't read your poems? Who find it hard to get the news from poetry
but die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

     It's night. The Connecticut slips by across Rt. 5. The moon is my egg
     and stars, my salt. I score the music of the carrots, scallions, and corn in
the frost of the freezer windows. The sough of traffic on 91 washes my ears
with the sound of tires on blue macadam. The doors close in an hour....
     We'll both be lonely when we return on the long dark roads to our silent
     houses. I touch your book and dream of our odyssey westward to a field
in Oregon, Kansas, or California where we plant our oars and die ironically.
Where we finish our journey as strangers in our native land. These are the
     lyrics to our song in the aisles—the buzz of the swarm with our queen
     at the center. What America did you have, old howler, when you scattered
into the sky, then floated like a cloud as another form in the making outside
of time, forgetful at last and empty of all you sang?

Chard deNiord, "At the Putney Co-Op, an Opera" from Interstate. Copyright © 2015 by Chard deNiord.  

Buffalo Dusk

by Carl Sandburg

The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And the buffaloes are gone.

Morningside Heights, July

by William Matthews

Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner. How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon. A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.

William Matthews, “Morningside Heights, July” from After All: Last Poems. Copyright © 1998 by William Matthews.