Classic and Contemporary Poetry
ONE AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: One came home from forced labor to Last Line: The fields of where we all are one. Subject(s): Cambodia; Death; Graves; War; Dead, The; Tombs; Tombstones | ||||||||
One came home from forced labor to collapsed bamboo, leaf rubble of his village, followed in grief a thread of happy memory to the field where, with rice baskets full beneath silken slaps of Buddhist pennants, the village picnicked. One found a stench, putrescent stews of naked women with their babes in open pits. Now this one's concierge of the bone tower. Like Genghis Khan's or Tamerlane's skull towers on the wind-raw plains of Asia, but cooped up in glass, this is a library of shelved brainboxes which look out blind to all compass points for others of their own kind. I photograph girls labeled prepubescent, but am tugged to the next shelf, labeled "Europeans," as one nods condolences. But eyeless, lipless, brought down to bone, I cannot mourn mine separately since we are every one the dead as we are every one the killers. The longan tree, rummaging for bloom and fruit in blood-brewed earth beneath the pits, one day will shade picnics, banners, children scratching games in this dust, at play in the fields of where we all are one. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE SURVIVOR AMONG GRAVES by RANDALL JARRELL SUBJECTED EARTH by ROBINSON JEFFERS THE GRAVE OF MRS. HEMANS by CECIL FRANCES ALEXANDER THOSE GRAVES IN ROME by LARRY LEVIS NOT TO BE DWELLED ON by HEATHER MCHUGH ONE LAST DRAW OF THE PIPE by PAUL MULDOON ETRUSCAN TOMB by JOHN FREDERICK NIMS ENDING WITH A LINE FROM LEAR by MARVIN BELL |
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