Countries including Japan and Kuwait have pledged at least 13 billion dollars in grants and loans to Iraq. More than 70 nations attended a donors' conference in Madrid this week, where the U-S tried to drum up international support. The ongoing discussion about funding the rebuilding of Iraq, has reminded WNYC Poet-In-Residence Phil Levine of a poem about the financial cost of war:

Homage to a Government

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.
- Philip Larkin

For more from WNYC's Poet in Residence, click here.

Poetry Links

www.frankohara.com
A really fun Frank O'Hara fan site
Theodore Roethke
from Poetry Exhibits
William Matthews LINKS
from Poets.org
Mingus at the Half Note is in a WIlliams' Collection, Time & Money: New Poems (1995)
Read an interview with William Matthews from the Atlantic Monthly
The Alun Lewis Page
For information on Alun Lewis
War Poetry
Alun Lewis' War Poems
Alfred A Knopf on Philip Levine
Information on many of Levine's books
Galway Kinnell Reads Walt Whitman
Kinnell reads Whitman's "To The States" and comments on it
Philip Levine on the Internet Poetry Archive.
Read Levine's poetry and listen to Levine read his poetry
The Leonard Lopate Show: Poetry Magazine
Hear Mr. Lopate talk about the 100 million-dollar donation from Ruth Lilly to Poetry Magazine
The Next Big Thing: Poetry Lives
Alice Quinn, poetry editor for the New Yorker and executive director of the Poetry Society of America, sorts through some entries to the Poetry in Motion Contest
e-poets Network Book of Voices
a list of poets and poems from the Chicago area-- you can listen to poets read their work
The Poetry Project
is at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, since 1966
Bartleby.com
A collection of books online, including a bounty of verse
An Audible Anthology
A collection of poems printed in the Atlantic Montly to read or listen to
Gumball Poetry
It's a zine, it's a website, it's a gumball machine that dispenses poetry!

A selection of Philip Levine's books

A New Selected Poems
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
The Simple Truth
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
The Mercy
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
What Work Is: Poems
Available for purchase at Amazon.com