World War I Poem

All through the war
there’s no singing,
then one day
everyone’s singing.

And we are unprepared, the friends
of the dead, we who wake now
without reason while all about us
cars fly by sailing little

flags, little stupid flags,
while children sing
through the broken windows
of provincial churches.

Everyone knows that the bones
go away faster without marrow,
that a god, outmoded and outdefined,
cannot manage every fixture of the day

and so gives each day allotments
of sound, light, pain,
meaning when there were great bombardments
the whales went silent,

when rifle regiments with ancient names
raised their weapons to the sky
and fired hopelessly at scouting planes
someone, dying alone

suddenly found himself
unable to scream. And the sound
that’s left after that, the thin ribbons
not eaten up by rifle fire

move through us in waves—
miracle waves, dread waves—and the gone
feel nothing, say nothing, which means
the children can sing a little louder.



Reprinted from Winter Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2023) with permission of the author and publisher. All rights reserved.