At Bessemer
by Philip Levine
19 years old and going nowhere,
I got a ride to Bessemer and walked
the night road toward Birmingham
passing dark groups of men cursing
the end of a week like every week.
Out of town I found a small grove
of trees, high narrow pines, and I
sat back against the trunk of one
as the first rains began slowly.
South, the lights of Bessemer glowed
as though a new sun rose there,
but it was midnight and another shift
tooled the rolling mills. I must
have slept awhile, for someone
else was there beside me. I could
see a cigarette’s soft light,
and once a hand grazed mine, man
or woman’s I never knew. Slowly
I could feel the darkness fill
my eyes and the dream that came was
of a bright world where sunlight
fell on the long even rows of houses
and I looked down from great height
at a burned world I believed
I never had to enter. When
the true sun rose I was stiff
and wet, and there beside me was
the small white proof that someone
rolled and smoked and left me there
unharmed, truly untouched.
A hundred yards off I could hear
cars on the highway. A life
was calling to be lived, but how
and why I had still to learn.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- The Letter poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Epitaph On An Infant. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Immigrants by Robert Frost
- Fancy In Nubibus, Or The Poet In The Clouds by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- The Dream poem – Amy Levy poems | Poems and Poetry
- A Bard’s Epitaph by Robert Burns
- Sleepless by Sara Teasdale
- Sonnet To Spenser poem – John Keats poems
- Ode To Lycoris. May 1817 by William Wordsworth
- Владимир Маяковский – Тёплое слово кое-каким порокам
- Николай Гумилев – Канцона (Бывает в жизни человека)
- Nevertheless by Marianne Moore
- Новелла Матвеева – Когда Вселенная открывает нам добровольно
- In a Subway Station by Sara Teasdale
- Dust by Rupert Brooke
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
Philip Levine ( 1928 – 2015) was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012