The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 15: THE YOUTH AND WAR

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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 YOUTH AND WAR

She said, “I will hide all the brave books away from him,

With their scarlet letters that burn into the heart;

I will lock their spell and their sovereign sway from him;

I will rear him tenderly, a life apart.”

But the day came and the hour came,

And the foul deed struck him like a spur;

And he felt the shame and the swift flame,

And his eyes were strange to her.

In the dreams of the night had the old Captains come to him,

And the staunch old Admirals that died long ago;

From the old fields of fight came the roll of the drum to him,

With a call that his mother could not know;

It seemed that a Sword gleamed blinding-bright

At the dawn-edge of the sky;

And he said, “O Mother, the Right is the Right:

I must fight for it now though I die!”