Saturday, December 6, 2008

After the Winnowing, 1945

Imagine only

A stone's throw away
From the marble threshing floor,

Hard stone-ground bread
Being broken into pieces,

Then hurled at sunken cheeks--
The urchins in the village are playing

War again.

6 comments:

  1. "Intense" because it remains very close to home; for reasons still inexplicable to me, I have no clear memories of the first four years of my life in Greece before being taken to the USA; I find myself wondering why.

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  2. I expect it might be a deeper form of memory — something that resides in the sinews and bones. At the same time, the poem feels like a memory of my own. Shared memory? Memory held in common?

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  3. It's an all too common memory for males in any culture, I imagine. "Playing war." War always "a stone's throw away," all of us working back toward Frost's "old-stone savage armed"....

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