House Of Silence
by Philip Levine
The winter sun, golden and tired,
settles on the irregular army
of bottles. Outside the trucks
jostle toward the open road,
outside it’s Saturday afternoon,
and young women in black pass by
arm in arm. This bar
is the house of silence, and we drink
to silence without raising our voices
in the old way. We drink to doors
that don’t open, to the four walls
that dose their eyes, hands that run,
fingers that count change, toes
that add up to ten. Suspended
as we are between our business
and our rest, we feel the sudden peace
of wine and the agony of stale bread.
Columbus sailed from here 30 years ago
and never wrote home. On Saturdays
like this the phone still rings for him.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Plague Of Dead Sharks
- Владимир Маяковский – Про Тита и Ваньку
- As We Like It by W H Auden
- Year’s End by Weldon Kees
- The Scud by William Barnes
- DEATH AND VISION by Satish Verma
- Mary’s Son – A Tale of Christmas – An Inspiring Read
- The Withering Of The Boughs by William Butler Yeats
- The house where I was born (07) by Yves Bonnefoy
- Robinson by Weldon Kees
- The Remains by Mark Strand
- Terrible Ted poem – Alexander E. Musset poems | Poetry Monster
- A Garden, Written after the Civil Wars poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- The Mower’s Song poem – Andrew Marvell poems
- On the Idle Hill of Summer by A. E. Housman
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
Philip Levine ( 1928 – 2015) was an American poet best known for his poems about working-class Detroit. He taught for more than thirty years in the English department of California State University, Fresno and held teaching positions at other universities as well. He served on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets from 2000 to 2006, and was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2011–2012