Wislawa Szymborska

[Stormy]

Originally Posted by Optimus Funk

Ok first, about "The End and the Beginning", sad and very true, but I am lost in the fact that it tells what we feel, I mean It tells the facts very well, we hate war, we know why we hate war, it points it out so well, but I hate to bang a gong we are over that!, War Kills, War is Evil!, We need solutions not reflections! Harsh maybe, the truth yes. I agree with you all my heart understand that, but I just want us to stop, In conclusion I can only say this as my poem.....


"The War"

STOP!

by Brian Hohman.....

I think the central theme of the poem is more than anti-war. It hopes to extrapolate the degeneration of the horrors of war during the post-war period, in which the dead ARE left "In the grass which has overgrown / reasons and causes," and what is forgotten behind the bushes and what is forgetting things behind the bushes understands "...less than little. And finally as little as nothing. " I appreciate the closing image of the poem the most, with the glazed eyes staring at the sky. I think it's an appropriate representation of what war becomes when it has passed; something grotesquely idyllic.

A pair of poems I read while drunk last night and which encouraged me to return to more poetry:

A Speech at the Lost and Found
I lost a few goddesses on my way from south to north,
as well as many gods on my way from east to west.
Some stars went out on me for good: part of me, O sky.
Island after island collapsed into the sea on me.
I'm not sure exactly where I left my claws,
who wears my fur, who dwells in my shell.
My siblings died out when I crawled onto land
and only a tiny bone in me marks the anniversary.
I leapt out of my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,
and left my senses many many times.
Long ago I closed my third eye to it all,
waved it off with my fins, shrugged my branches.

Scattered by the four winds to a place that time forgot,
how little there remains of me surprises me a lot,
a singular being of human kind for now,
who lost her umbrella in a tram somehow.


A Large Number
Four billion people on this earth,
but my imagination is the way it's always been:
bad with large numbers.
It is still moved by particularity.
It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,
disclosing only random faces,
while the rest go blindly by,
unthought of, unpitied.
Not even a Dante could have stopped that.
So what do you do when you're not,
even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar---a premature worry.
Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?
It never has been, and even less so now.
I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,
but what I reject, is more numerous,
more dense, more intrusive than ever.
At the cost of untold losses--a poem, a sigh.
I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.
How much I am silent about I can't say.
A mouse at the foot of mouther mountain.
Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.
[--page break-- (not part of poem)]
My dreams--even they are not as populous as they should be.
There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.
Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.
A single hand turns a knob.
Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.
I run from the threshold down into the quiet
valley, seemingly no one's--an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from--
that I don't know.