You Can Have It
by Philip Levine
My brother comes home from work
and climbs the stairs to our room.
I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop
one by one. You can have it, he says.
The moonlight streams in the window
and his unshaven face is whitened
like the face of the moon. He will sleep
long after noon and waken to find me gone.
Thirty years will pass before I remember
that moment when suddenly I knew each man
has one brother who dies when he sleeps
and sleeps when he rises to face this life,
and that together they are only one man
sharing a heart that always labours, hands
yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps
for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it?
All night at the ice plant he had fed
the chute its silvery blocks, and then I
stacked cases of orange soda for the children
of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time
with always two more waiting. We were twenty
for such a short time and always in
the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt
and sweat. I think now we were never twenty.
In 1948 the city of Detroit, founded
by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes
of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died,
no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace,
for there was no such year, and now
that year has fallen off all the old newspapers,
calendars, doctors’ appointments, bonds
wedding certificates, drivers licenses.
The city slept. The snow turned to ice.
The ice to standing pools or rivers
racing in the gutters. Then the bright grass rose
between the thousands of cracked squares,
and that grass died. I give you back 1948.
I give you all the years from then
to the coming one. Give me back the moon
with its frail light falling across a face.
Give me back my young brother, hard
and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse
for God and burning eyes that look upon
all creation and say, You can have it.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Sonnet 85: My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still by William Shakespeare
- Song—O let me in this ae night by Robert Burns
- Николай Заболоцкий – Осеннее утро
- Occasioned By Some Verses of His Grace the Duke of Buckingham poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- Thrushes by Siegfried Sassoon
- Soup Song by Russell Edson
- Broken Love by Talha Jafri
- You Say You Love poem – John Keats poems
- Анатолий Жигулин – Кострожоги
- An Answer To A Copy Of Verses Sent Me To Jersey
- Poems by William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience and the Book of Thel
- The Gardener XXVIII: Your Questioning Eyes by Rabindranath Tagore
- What a Glow Everywhere I see – Aaj Rung Hai poem – with a translation Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- My impure god and I by Murali Sivaramakrishnan
- Named by Stephen Dunn
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