House Of Silence
by Philip Levine
The winter sun, golden and tired,
settles on the irregular army
of bottles. Outside the trucks
jostle toward the open road,
outside it’s Saturday afternoon,
and young women in black pass by
arm in arm. This bar
is the house of silence, and we drink
to silence without raising our voices
in the old way. We drink to doors
that don’t open, to the four walls
that dose their eyes, hands that run,
fingers that count change, toes
that add up to ten. Suspended
as we are between our business
and our rest, we feel the sudden peace
of wine and the agony of stale bread.
Columbus sailed from here 30 years ago
and never wrote home. On Saturdays
like this the phone still rings for him.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Олег Бундур – Бесконечность
- Any Poet At Any Time poem – Alfred Austin
- Robert Burns: To Miss Ferrier: Enclosing the Elegy on Sir J. H. Blair.
- Lamia. Part I poem – John Keats poems
- A Drunken Man’s Praise Of Sobriety by William Butler Yeats
- Николай Глазков – Движутся телеги и калеки
- In Me, Past, Present, Future meet by Siegfried Sassoon
- Olney Hymn 5: Jehovah-Shalom: The Lord Send Peace by William Cowper
- Tim, An Irish Terrier by Winifred Mary Letts
- I am only the house of your beloved by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- In January by Ted Kooser
- Did I Not Say To You by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- Stars Over The Dordogne by Sylvia Plath
- Юрий Коринец – Стихи о вшах
- Twelve O’Clock by Rabindranath Tagore
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