The Poetry of American Wars

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The Poetry of American Wars

• by
• H. C. Dorn

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The Battle of Concord Bridge
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Ralph Waldo Emerson1803-1882
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• By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
• Their flag to Aprils breeze unfurled,
• Here once the embattled farmers stood,
• And fired the shot heard round the world.

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• The foe long since in silence slept
• Alike the conqueror silent sleeps
• And time the ruined bridge has swept
• Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

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• On this green bank, by this soft stream,
• We set today a votive stone
• That memory may their deed redeem,
• When like our sires,our sons are gone.

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• Spirit, that made those heroes dare
• To die, and leave their children free,
• Bid time and Nature gently spare
• The shaft we raise to them and thee.
• Emerson

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War of 1812
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The Star -Spangled Banner
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• Star-Spangled Banner
• Oh, say can you see, By the dawns early light,
• What so proudly we hailed a the twilights last
  gleeming,
• Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the
  perilous fight,
• Oer the ramparts we watched were so gallantly
  streaming?

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• And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting
  in air,
• Gave proof thro the night that our flag was
  still there.
• Oh, say, does that star -spangled banner yet wave
• Oer the land of the free and the home of the
  brave!

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• ...4th Verse
• Oh thus be it ever when freeman shall stand
• Between their loved homes and the wars
  desolation
• Blest with victory and peace, may the
  heaven-rescued land
• Praise the power that hath made and preserved us
  a nation!

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• Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
• And this be our motto in God is our trust
• And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth
  wave,
• Oer the land of the free and the home of the
  brave!
• Francis Scott Key
• 1779-1843

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Civil War1861 -1865
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• Gettysburg
• It doesnt hurt a bit to be shot in a wooden leg.
  
• - Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell, CSA
• It is a swelling and falling away of ground,
• Stones and stone, the trees are lined up along
  the wall,
• And an accumulation of names.
• Gettysburg has an echo
• Like a shout in rocks.
• You hear it
• even when you look away.
• Say Spanglers Spring or Culps Hill,
• The Round Tops , the Angle,
• Say the Devils Den,

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• Say Cemetery Hill,
• Fifty Thousand hit in July,
• Down in Pennsylvania Farm dirt.
• Richard Dillard felt his leg collapse
• With a bright stain like a fallen flag.
• Home is just over the hill, they said,
• And two year later it was.
• Well fight them till hell freezes over,
• And then, sir, we will fight them on the ice.
• Too bad, Lee said, too bad.
• Oh, too bad. And then the rain
• Slid down the butts of rifles,
• Down the barrels and bayonet blades
• And into the ground the first drops
• Dancing into the dust like live things,
• Then a rush that laid all dust to rest.

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• The real war was somewhere to the west.
• This one was only a dream, a spring
• Of dreams, dreams that still splash
• Like living things on the ground.
• It is ground and grass,
• A piling up of names like stones,
• It is earth and air, a place to live.
• You can move through echoes without a glance
• Or drop them like postcards into the box
• To be sent on with best wishes.
• Or you can walk out Wainwright Avenue
• Past Hancock on his horse, and Slocum,
• Slowly, thinking of another day, other days,
• Watch the high clouds circle like birds
• And hold hands or not this day, as you will.

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• You fill the muscles in your legs
• Climbing Culps Hill, climbing the tower
• On Culps Hill, feel the blood moving
• In them like slow ice or warm as plowed ground.
• Names fade in this accumulation of air.
• You can see the day turn through the clouds.
• If you need to remember anything,
• It is the best way home.
• R. H. W. Dillard
• In
• A New Pleiade
• LSU Press 1998

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• Gettysburg Address
• Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers
  brought forth upon this continent a new nation,
  conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
  proposition that all men are created equal. Now
  we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
  whether that nation, or any nation so conceived
  and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on
  a great battlefield of that war. We have come to
  dedicate a portion of that field as a final
  resting-place for those who here gave their lives
  that that nation might live. It is altogether
  fitting and proper that we should do this. But in
  a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot
  consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The
  brave men, living and dead, who struggled here,
  have consecrated it far above our poor power to
  add or detract. The world will little note , nor
  long remember what we say here but it can never
  forget what they did here.

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• It is for us, the living, rather to be
  dedicated to the unfinished work which they that
  fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
  is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
  great task remaining before us, that from these
  honored dead we take increased devotion that we
  here highly resolve that these dead shall not
  have died in vain that this nation, under God,
  shall have a new birth of freedom, and that
  government of the people, by the people,
• and for the people, shall not perish from
  the earth.
• Abraham Lincoln
• November 19, 1863

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World War I1914-1918
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• An Irish Airman Forsees His Death
• I know that I will meet my fate
• Somewhere among the clouds above
• Those that I fight I do not hate,
• Those that I guard I do not love
• My country is Kiltartan Cross,
• My countrymen Kiltartans poor,
• No likely end could bring them loss
• Or leave them happier than before.
• Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
• Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
• A lonely impulse of delight

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• Drove to this tumult in the clouds
• I balanced all, brought all to mind,
• The years to come seemed waste of breath,
• A waste of breath the years behind
• In balance with this life, this death.
• William Butler Yeats
• 1865-1939

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• In Flanders Fields
• In Flanders fields the poppies blow
• Between the crosses, row on row,
• That mark our place and in the sky
• The larks , still bravely singing, fly
• Scarce heard amid the guns below.
• We are the dead. Short days ago
• We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
• Loved and were loved, and now we lie
• in Flanders Fields.

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• Take up our quarrel with the foe
• To you from failing hands we throw
• The torch be yours to hold it high.
• If ye break faith with us who die
• We shall not sleep, though poppies grow in
  Flanders fields.
• Lieutenant-Colonel John McRae
• Died in France
• January 28, 1918

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World War II1939-1945
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• The War in the Air
• For a saving grace, we didnt see our dead,
• Who rarely bothered to come home to die
• But simply stayed away out there
• In the clean war, the war in the air.
• Seldom the ghosts came back bearing their tales
• Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
• But staying up their in the relative wind,
• Shades falling in the mind,

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• Who had no graves but only epitaphs,
• Where never so many spoke for so few
• Per Ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
• Per Aspera, to the stars.
• That was the good war, the war we won
• As if there were no death, for goodness sake,
• With the help of the losses we left out there
• In the air, in the empty air.
• Howard Nemerov
• 1920-1991
• In Contemporay American Poetry
• J. D. McClatchy, ed.

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• No Holy Wars for Them
• States strong enough to do good are few.
• Their number would seem limited to three
• Good is a thing that they, the great, can do,
• But puny little states can only be.

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• And being good for these means standing by
• To watch a war in nominal alliance,
• And when its over watch the worlds supply
• Get parceled out among the winning giants

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• God, have you taken cognizance of this?
• And what is your fine position?
• That nations like the Cuban and the Swiss
• Can never hope to wage a Global Mission.

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• No Holy Wars for them. The most the small
• Can ever give us is a nuisance brawl.
• Robert Frost
• in
• The Poetry of Robert Frost
• Edward Connery Lathem, ed.

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The Gulf War
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• Sparrows
• A pilot chalks one of his missiles,For Debra.
• She waits there under his wing, a sparrow.
• In Shinkichis Takahashis eye, sparrows circle
• into world without end, without beginning.
• Maybe the pilot and his Debra, even before Kitty
  Hawk,
• Will someday celebrate Christmas with their four
  children
• In this village where I live in hiding.
• I throw seed under a pine for sparrows and
  morning doves
• Who may themselves be Debra in other
  incarnations..

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• How many sparrows can we pack under our wings
• Or set dancing like angels on the head of a pin
• Before the stars fall, and we lose everything?
• William Heyen
• From
• Ribbons
• The Gulf War
• 1991

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• At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington,
  D.C.
• Chrissie

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• In the shade of a maple. She sits on the ground.
  At a distance
• From the wall- looking at a
• Name she knows is there.
• Her fathers. Killed near Khe Sanh. Two months
  before she
• Was born. Sixteen years ago.
• You look exactly like him,
• She is told. And she does-
• She knows from her mothers photo-album. But
  today she
• Sits contemplating his love for
• Her. Her love for him.
• So much a part of her.

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• Growing-up beautiful. But
• Without his seeing her,
• Holding herwithout
• Hearing him call her name.
• The handsome First Lieutenant
• Who would have been so
• Proud of her. Her dad.
• Eugene E. Grollmes
• in
• From Both Sides Now
• P. Mahoney, ed.