How Much Earth
by Philip Levine
Torn into light, you woke wriggling
on a woman’s palm. Halved, quartered,
shredded to the wind, you were the life
that thrilled along the underbelly
of a stone. Stilled in the frozen pond
you rinsed heaven with a sigh.
How much earth is a man.
A wall fies down and roses
rush from its teeth; in the fists
of the hungry, cucumbers sleep
their lives away, under your nails
the ocean moans in its bed.
How much earth.
The great ice fields slip
and the broken veins of an eye
startle under light, a hand is planted
and the grave blooms upward
in sunlight and walks the roads.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Ольга Берггольц – Вот я выбирала для разлуки
- Phantasm
- Владимир Высоцкий – Дела
- Narva and Mored by Thomas Chatterton
- The Conspiracy by Robert Creeley
- The Dunciad: Book IV poem – Alexander Pope poems | Poetry Monster
- A Song : On The Green Margin by William Cowper
- Poem on Sensibility by Robert Burns
- Федор Тютчев – 23 Fevrier 1861
- Owl by Sylvia Plath
- Николай Гумилев – Ночь
- Shadow Overhead by Vaishnavi Prakash
- The Thin People by Sylvia Plath
- Grandmother’s Teaching poem – Alfred Austin
- Владимир Высоцкий – У профессиональных игроков
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