I Sing The Body Electric
by Philip Levine
People sit numbly at the counter
waiting for breakfast or service.
Today it’s Hartford, Connecticut
more than twenty-five years after
the last death of Wallace Stevens.
I have come in out of the cold
and wind of a Sunday morning
of early March, and I seem to be
crying, but I’m only freezing
and unpeeled. The waitress brings
me hot tea in a cracked cup,
and soon it’s all over my paper,
and so she refills it. I read
slowly in The New York Times
that poems are dying in Iowa,
Missoula, on the outskirts of Reno,
in the shopping galleries of Houston.
We should all go to the grave
of the unknown poet while the rain
streaks our notebooks or stand
for hours in the freezing winds
off the lost books of our fathers
or at least until we can no longer
hold our pencils. Men keep coming
in and going out, and two of them
recall the great dirty fights
between Willy Pep and Sandy Sadler,
between little white perfection
and death in red plaid trunks.
I want to tell them I saw
the last fight, I rode out
to Yankee Stadium with two deserters
from the French Army of Indochina
and back with a drunken priest
and both ways the whole train
smelled of piss and vomit, but no
one would believe me. Those are
the true legends better left to die.
In my black rain coat I go back
out into the gray morning and dare
the cars on North Indemnity Boulevard
to hit me, but no one wants trouble
at this hour. I have crossed
a continent to bring these citizens
the poems of the snowy mountains,
of the forges of hopelessness,
of the survivors of wars they
never heard of and won’t believe.
Nothing is alive in this tunnel
of winds of the end of winter
except the last raging of winter,
the cats peering smugly from the homes
of strangers, and the great stunned sky
slowly settling like a dark cloud
lined only with smaller dark clouds.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Farewell to London poem – Alexander Pope
- The Owners Of The Little Box by Vasko Popa
- Lament For Culloden by Robert Burns
- Come, Come, Whoever You Are by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
- mine danse macabre doppelganger by matthew scott harris
- Гавриил Державин – На умеренность
- Stanzas by William Wordsworth
- On the Subject of Poetry by W. S. Merwin
- When Day Is Done by Rabindranath Tagore
- The Death of Knowledge by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
- The Conundrum of the Workshops by Rudyard Kipling
- Italy
- The Snowman on the Moor by Sylvia Plath
- Exposure by Seamus Heaney
- Twenty-Four Hokku On A Modern Theme poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
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