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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 13: THE IMPERATIVE
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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.

THE IMPERATIVE

Whether we lose the light
Of love or of the sun,
With body and blood and mind and might
Must this sole thing be done:
The world is a broken ball,
Stained red because it fell
Out of bounds, in a game of kings,
Over the wall of hell:
And now must the spirit of man
Arise and adventure all—
Leap the wall sheer down into hell
And bring up the broken ball.
Worth well, to lose the light
Of love or of the sun,
Worth endless fire or endless night,
So this sole thing were done!