For the past few weeks, we have been inviting poets on to our air to read a poem of their choice. Last week, pulitzer prize winning poet Philip Levine was thinking about green markets, hoping that spring would arrive soon. This week, he's thinking about the troops we're sending over to Iraq as well as those who are being left behind...

Levine: This is Philip Levine. This morning I think especially of the poems of loss… no doubt because of where we seem headed as a nation and I would like to read a remarkable poem out of World War 2 … a very little known poem written by a welsh poet Alun Lewis who went off to India in 1943 leaving a wife who he had hoped would be pregnant as she had hoped that and they, of course, they were both disappointed.

He died in Burma. His death was waiting for him and he found it… which was incredibly moving because partly because he never wanted to go in the first place. He was a pacifist but he felt urged into war by more and more events and in a late letter to his wife Gweno, written from India, he wrote an extraordinary two sentences. He said, "Acceptance seems so spiritless, protest so vein. In between the two I live."

The poem in many ways mirrors his and Gweno's experience. In the poem, the wife, left in England speaks.
The poem is called Song.

SONG

(On seeing dead bodies floating off the Cape)

The first month of his absence
I was numb and sick
And where he's left his promise
Life did not turn or kick
The seed, the seed of love was sick.

The second month my eyes were sunk
In the darkness of despair,
And my bed was like a grave
And his ghost was lying there.
And my heart was sick with care.

The third month of his going
I thought I heard him say
"Our course deflected slightly
On the thirty-second day-"
The tempest blew his words away.

And he was lost among the waves,
His ship rolled helpless in the sea,
The fourth month of his voyage
He shouted grievously
"Beloved, do not think of me."

The flying fish like kingfishers
Skim the sea's bewildered crests,
The whales blow steaming fountains,
The seagulls have no nests
Where my lover sways and rests.

We never thought to buy and sell
This life that blooms or withers in the leaf,
And I'll not stir, so he sleeps well,
Though cell by cell the coral reef
Builds an eternity of grief.

But oh! the drag and dullness of my Self;
The turning seasons wither in my head;
All this slowness, all this hardness,
The nearness that is waiting in my bed,
The gradual self-effacement of the dead.

It's a wonderful poem about how we survive our losses-- how the woman begins to accept into her life that he's gone and even learns finally to blame him for it as he effaces himself...

And this is an especially good time to think about how the hell we're gonna survive some of the losses we're gonna have...

This is Phil Levine for WNYC.

Host Back announce: Philip Levine divides his time between New York City and Fresno, California . He teaches at New York University. His most recent book of poems is called The Mercy.

Poetry Links

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