Veterans Day is not just American, so this isn't entirely appropriate, but I leap on any excuse to quote Richard Wilbur. From "For Music."
Mourn for the dead who died for this country,
Whose minds went dark at the edge of a field,
In the muck of a trench, on the beachhead sand,
In a blast amidships, a burst in the air.
What did they think of before they forgot us?
In the blink of time before they forgot us?
The glare and whiskey of Saturday evening?
The drone or lilt of their family voices?
The bend of a trout-stream? A fresh-made bed?
The sound of a lathe, or the scent of sawdust?
The mouth of a woman? A prayer? Who knows?
Let us not force them to speak in chorus,
These men diverse in their names and faces
Who lived in a land where a life could be chosen.
Say that they mattered, alive and after;
That they gave us time to become what we could.*Grieve for the ways in which we betrayed them,
How we robbed their graves of a reason to die;
The tribes pushed west, and the treaties broken,
The image of God on the auction block,
The immigrant scorned, and the striker beaten,
The vote denied to liberty's daughters.
From all that has shamed us, what can we salvage?
Be proud at least that we know we were wrong,
That we need not lie, that our books are open.
Praise to this land for our power to change it,
To confess our misdoings, to mend what we can,
To learn what we mean and to make it the law,
To become what we said we were going to be.
Praise to our peoples, who came as strangers,
Who more and more have been shaped into one
Like a great statue brought over in pieces,
Its hammered copper bolted together,
Anchored by rods in the continent's rock,
With a core of iron, and a torch atop it.
Praise to this land that its most oppressed
Have marched in peace from the dark of the past
To speak in our time, and in Washington's shadow,
Their invincible hope to be be free at last—
Lord God Almighty, free
At last to cast their shackles down
And wear the common crown
Of liberté, of liberty.
2 comments:
Beautiful and perfect.
Just had to add my favorite RW poem from among many much-loved RW poems:
Love Calls us to the Things of This World:
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.’
Mm, Richard Wilbur. "To His Skeleton," "Winter Spring," and the wedding toast are among my favorites, but generally it's whatever I'm reading that I like best. The combo of old-fashioned commitment to rhyme and meter, a warm humane attitude, and a vocabulary that knocks most of us back...sigh. Just sigh.
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