It was a summer evening, Old Kaspar's work was done, And he before his cottage door Was sitting in the sun, And by him sported on the green His little grandchild Wilhelmine.
She saw her brother Peterkin Roll something large and round, Which he beside the rivulet In playing there had found; He came to ask what he had found, That was so large, and smooth, and round.
So it did not come as a surprise—a relief, almost—when we heard the tac-tac-tac of machine guns and the thud of grenades rising up from the woods below. The Germans were advancing again through the tangle of bomb-shattered branches, clearing a path with axe-blows, foreheads crushed beneath the overhang of great steel helmets, gleaming eyes fixed dead ahead. The rest of that day was bitter, and many of us fell forever headlong in the grass. But toward evening the voice of battle began to diminish, and then from the depths of the forest we could hear the song of the wounded: the serene, monotonous, sad-hopeful song of the wounded, joining the chorus of birds hidden in the foliage as they welcomed the return of the moon. It was still daylight, but the moon was rising sweetly from behind the forested mountains of Reims.
It was green against a white and tender sky…
A moon from the forest of Ardennes, a moon from the country of Rimbaud, of Verlaine, a delicate green moon, round and light,
I am thirty this November. You are still small, in your fourth year. We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer, flapping in the winter rain, falling flat and washed. And I remember mostly the three autumns you did not live here. They said I’d never get you back again.
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a load. And nothing happened: day was all but done. Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much when saved from work. His sister stood beside him in her apron To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaving the beach on a Sunday in a streetcar a family of three—mother, son and daughter: the mother, well on in the thirties, blond hair, worried face; the son, twelve years of age or so, seated opposite, and the daughter, about eight or nine, beside her. The boy was blond, too; a good-looking little fellow with dreamy eyes. The little girl was quite plain; mouth pulled down at the corners,
The little girl won’t eat her sandwich; she lifts the bun and looks in, but the grey beef coated with relish is always there. Her mother says, “Do it for mother.” Milk and relish and a hard bun that comes off like a hat—a kid’s life is a cinch.
And a mother’s life? “What can you do with a man like that?” she asks the sleeping cook
To think I might have been dead, he said to himself, ashamed, as if this were a curse of the heart, raising a bundle of bones to a man’s height. As if it were suddenly forbidden to touch even words that had dropped to the ground. Besides, he was afraid of finding his body in a metal press. Embarrassing down to the capillaries.
There were bees about. From the start I thought The day was apt to hurt. There is a high Hill of sand behind the sea and the kids Were dropping from the top of it like schools Of fish over falls, cracking skulls on skulls. I knew the holiday was hot. I saw The August sun teeming in the bodies Logged along the beach and felt the yearning
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