Occupation 1943

O
We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot
We boys, the neighborhood’s naked
We boys of stomachs bloated from eating mud
We boys of teeth porous from eating dates and pumpkin rind

We boys will line up from Hassan al-Basri’s mausoleum to the Ashar River’s source
to meet you in the morning waving green palm fronds

We will cry out: Long Live
We will cry out: Live to Eternity
And we will hear the music of Scottish bagpipes, gladly
sometimes we will laugh at an indian soldier’s beard
but fear will merge with our laughs, and dispute them

We cry out: Long Live
We cry out: Live to Eternity
and reach our hands toward you: Give us bread
We the hungry, starving since our birth in this village
Give us meat, chewing gum, cans, and fish
Give us, so no mother expels her child
so that we do not eat mud and sleep

We boys, the neighborhood’s barefoot
do not know from where you had come
or why you had come
or why we cry out: Long Live
...............................

And now we ask: will you stay long?
And will we go on reaching our hands toward you?

London, December 3, 2002
Rating:

Comment form:

*Max text - 1500. Manual moderation.

Similar Poems:

Kaddish by Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
For Naomi Ginsberg, 1894—1956 I
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.
Read Poem
0
136
Rating:

Campo dei Fiori by Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz
In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
Read Poem
0
85
Rating:

A Valediction of the Book by John Donne
John Donne
I’ll tell thee now (dear Love) what thou shalt do
To anger destiny, as she doth us,
How I shall stay, though she esloygne me thus
And how posterity shall know it too;
How thine may out-endure
Sybil’s glory, and obscure
Her who from Pindar could allure,
And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame,
And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name.

Study our manuscripts, those myriads
Of letters, which have past twixt thee and me,
Thence write our annals, and in them will be
To all whom love’s subliming fire invades,
Rule and example found;
Read Poem
0
148
Rating:

Harlem Riot, 1943 by Pauli Murray
Pauli Murray
Not by hammering the furious word,
Nor bread stamped in the streets,
Nor milk emptied in gutter,
Shall we gain the gates of the city.

But I am a prophet without eyes to see;
I do not know how we shall gain the gates
of the city.

August, 1943
Read Poem
0
109
Rating:

Nighttrains by Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez
When i blow open green bottles
straight across hump of a frozen tongue

when i shove brown glass
through skull of a possum
and pass from my ears a baptism of red piss

when i cry from my butt like a jackal
and throw limbs of a dying mule into the river

when i spit venom from the head
Read Poem
0
115
Rating:

Sketch of a Man on a Platform by Mina Loy
Mina Loy
Man of absolute physical equilibrium
You stand so straight on your legs
Every plank or clod you plant your feet on
Becomes roots for those limbs

Among the men you accrete to yourself
You are more heavy
And more light
Force being most equitably disposed
Read Poem
0
87
Rating:

A Song: Lying is an occupation by Laetitia Pilkington
Laetitia Pilkington
Lying is an occupation,
Used by all who mean to rise;
Politicians owe their station,
But to well concerted lies.

These to lovers give assistance,
To ensnare the fair-one's heart;
And the virgin's best resistance
Yields to this commanding art.
Read Poem
0
145
Rating:

Semele Recycled by Carolyn Kizer
Carolyn Kizer
After you left me forever,
I was broken into pieces,
and all the pieces flung into the river.
Then the legs crawled ashore
and aimlessly wandered the dusty cow-track.
They became, for a while, a simple roadside shrine:
A tiny table set up between the thighs
held a dusty candle, weed-and-fieldflower chains
Read Poem
0
109
Rating:

I dwell in Possibility – (466) by Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –
Impregnable of eye –
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky –
Read Poem
0
103
Rating:

Resolution and Independence by William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

All things that love the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops;—on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.
Read Poem
0
116
Rating:

The Seventh Inning by Donald Hall
Donald Hall
1.Baseball, I warrant, is not the whole
occupation of the aging boy.
Far from it: There are cats and roses;
there is her water body. She fills
the skin of her legs up, like water;
under her blouse, water assembles,
swelling lukewarm; her mouth is water,
her cheekbones cool water; water flows
Read Poem
0
106
Rating:

Call It Music by Philip Levine
Philip Levine
Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,
it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain
had come and gone, the sky washed blue. Bird
could have seen for miles if he'd looked, but what
he saw was so foreign he clenched his eyes,
shook his head, and barked like a dog—just once—
Read Poem
0
110
Rating: