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Join the Discussion • Two Lines for Peace “Here is an idea: Write a two-line poem that will foster peace in the world.”   --Pixordia

Elsewhere at About • Links for more info from About U.S. Government Info

Elsewhere on the Web • “The eerily intimate power of poetry to console” from The New York Times (free registration required to read articles) • Four poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Marianne Moore, Carlos Drummond de Andrade & Czeslaw Milosz, collected by Robert Pinsky in Slate • “Auden on Bin Laden” by Eric McHenry in Slate • “Poems for the Time,” anthology collected by Alicia Ostriker in Moby Lives • “Poetry and Tragedy,” reactions & poems from the recent Laureates in USA Today • “American Terror, writings in the immediate aftermath,” special issue of Masthead • Responses to the tragedy: Poems Found & a collaborative crisis poem at People's Poetry Gathering site

With thanks to the members of the NewPoetry list who reminded us of some of these poems, all worth rereading in these dark days:

• Carl Sandburg, “Losses” (1916)

  I have love
  And a child,
  A banjo
  And shadows.
  (Losses of God,
  All will go
  And one day
  We will hold
  Only the shadows.)

• William Butler Yeats, from “Meditations in Time of Civil War” (1928)
  
  VI
  The Stare's Nest by My Window
  
  The bees build in the crevices
  Of loosening masonry, and there
  The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
  My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.
  
  We are closed in, and the key is turned
  On our uncertainty; somewhere
  A man is killed, or a house burned,
  Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.
  
  A barricade of stone or of wood;
  Some fourteen days of civil war;
  Last night they trundled down the road
  That dead young soldier in his blood:
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.
  
  We had fed the heart on fantasies,
  The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
  More substance in our enmities
  Than in our love; O honey-bees,
  Come build in the empty house of the stare.
  
  
• Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish”
  
  And how Death is that remedy all singers dream of,
        sing, remember, prophesy as in the Hebrew Anthem,
        or the Buddhist Book of Answers--and my own imagination
        of a withered leaf--at dawn--
  Dreaming back thru life, Your time--and mine
        accelerating toward Apocalypse,
  the final moment--the flower burning in the Day--
        and what comes after,
  looking back on the mind itself that saw an American city
  a flash away, and the great dream of Me or China, or you
        and a phantom Russia, or a crumpled bed
        that never existed--
  like a poem in the dark--escaped back to Oblivion--
  
  
• William Blake, “Prologue, Intended for a Dramatic Piece of King Edward the Fourth”
  
  O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
  To drown the throat of war! When the senses
  Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
  Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressèd
  Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
  When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
  Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
  Drive the nations together, who can stand?
  When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
  And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
  When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
  And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
  O who can stand? O who hath causèd this?
  O who can answer at the throne of God?
  The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
  Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!
  
  
• W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
  
  
• Edith Sitwell, “Still Falls the Rain” (1940)
  
  
• Adrienne Rich, In Those Years (1991)

  In those years, people will say, we lost track
  of the meaning of we, of you
  we found ourselves
  reduced to I
  and the whole thing became
  silly, ironic, terrible:
  we were trying to live a personal life
  and, yes, that was the only life
  we could bear witness to
  
  But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
  into our personal weather
  They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
  along the shore, through rages of fog
  where we stood, saying I

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