How Much Earth
by Philip Levine
Torn into light, you woke wriggling
on a woman’s palm. Halved, quartered,
shredded to the wind, you were the life
that thrilled along the underbelly
of a stone. Stilled in the frozen pond
you rinsed heaven with a sigh.
How much earth is a man.
A wall fies down and roses
rush from its teeth; in the fists
of the hungry, cucumbers sleep
their lives away, under your nails
the ocean moans in its bed.
How much earth.
The great ice fields slip
and the broken veins of an eye
startle under light, a hand is planted
and the grave blooms upward
in sunlight and walks the roads.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- To John Hamilton Reynolds poem – John Keats poems
- A Lover To His Mistress by William Strode
- The Merman poem – Lord Alfred Tennyson poems
- Sonnet 1: From fairest creatures we desire increase by William Shakespeare
- To Any Dead Officer by Siegfried Sassoon
- What time are we living in by T. Wignesan
- The Ballad of the Red Earl by Rudyard Kipling
- O Singer in Brown by Mary Gilmore
- He Has Lived In Many Houses by Thomas Lux
- Runner, The. by Walt Whitman
- Василий Лебедев-Кумач – Только на фронте
- Федор Тютчев – Князю Суворову
- Юрий Левитанский – Мое поколение
- Владимир Корнилов – Командировка на Север
- Валерий Брюсов – Февраль
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