The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 12: EARTH-BROWN ARMIES

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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

EARTH-BROWN ARMIES

Earth-brown armies, on the brown earth whither,

Ant-like swarming, rush ye in your wrath?

—We wrestle and we tug and we pull all together

To shift the giant Dead Thing that lies across the path.

Earth-brown armies, but should it roll and smother,

Log-like topple, and crush you in the clod?

—Earth would pour new armies, one behind another,

To shift the giant Dead Thing that blocks the way of God!