Poetry

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) TRADITION OF THIS ACRE This is the word our lips caress, our teeth bite on the pale spongy fruit of this, the name : mouthing the story, cowlike in dignity, and spitting it in the tarnished cuspidor of present days. And if there were radium in Plymouth Rock, they would not strike it (bruising the fair stone), nor gawk at Semiramis on Main Street nor measure the gentle Christ in terms of horse-power. Cracked bells are severally struck at noon. The furrow of their ways will cradle us all. Amen, amen, to the [...]

Originally published in U.S. 1 (1938) These are roads to take when you think of your country and interested bring down the maps again, phoning the statistician, asking the dear friend, reading the papers with morning inquiry. Or when you sit at the wheel and your small light chooses gas gauge and clock; and the headlights indicate future of road, your wish pursuing past the junction, the fork, the suburban station, well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety. Past your tall central city's influence, outside its body: traffic, penumbral crowds, are centers removed and strong, fighting for good reason. These roads [...]

Originally published in 1942 1 PROOF OF AMERICA! A fire on the sea, a tower of flame rising, flame falling out of the sky, a wave of flame like a great sea-wave breaking over this fighting island in its rain of wounds— fighting until the flames grew tall, fighting while waves broke and the enemy landed on each wave; fighting as if they were the fist of the world and they had a world to save. * * * Their backs to the immense cloud-melting sea empty of help, and the enemy eyes were close, and deadly close; they saw [...]

Originally published in Beast in View (1944) When I think of him, midnight Opens about me, and I am more alone; But then the poems flower from the bone.— You came to me bearing the truth in your two hands; I sit and look down at my hand like an astonished Fortune-teller, seeing the mortal flesh. Your wish was strong the first day of the war For it had been strong before, and then we knew All that I had to be, you had to do. Once when you stood before me, kisses rose About my lips; poems at my [...]

Originally published in The Green Wave (1948) The sky behind the farthest shore Is darker than I go to sleep. Blackness of water, the crater at the core, The many blacknesses begin to gleam. Rivers of darkness bind me to this land While overhead the moon goes far to shine, And now nothing nobody is my own. The motion of streams glitters before my eyes: Sources and entrances, they lie no more, Now darkly keep, now flow now bright Until all wandering end, a hand Shine, and the leadings homeward of delight Seem to begin my deepest sleep To make [...]

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) After you finish your work after you do your day after you've read your reading after you've written your say — you go down the street to the hot dog stand, one block down and across the way. On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century. Most of the windows are boarded up, the rats run out of a sack — sticking out of the crummy garage one shiny long Cadillac; at the glass door of the drug-addiction center, a man who'd like to break your back. But here's a brown [...]

Originally published in The Gates (1976) O for God's sakethey are connectedunderneath They look at each otheracross the glittering seasome keep a low profile Some are cliffsThe bathers thinkislands are separate like them   © Muriel Rukeyser

Originally published in Theory of Flight (1935) Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform, who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words, whether it is the crash of lips on lips after absence and wanting : we must close the circuits of ideas, now generate, that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose. Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky, here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame, here is the man night-walking who derives tomorrow's manifestoes from this midnight's meeting ; here we require proof in solidarity, iron on iron, [...]