Voices of 1918 by Kenneth Langer & Ellen Bryant Voigt

Voices of 1918

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We’d had a late frost, a ruined spring, a single jay was fretting in the bush, quick blue smudge in the laden spikes of lilac:

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it was an angel singing—don’t you see:

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it might as well have been a bush on fire.

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A large lake, a little island in it. Winter comes to the island and the ice forms along the shore— [music] when the first got sick others came in to nurse them and it spread, ice reaching out from the island into the lake.

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By ice I’m thinking just those in the ground;

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the sickness was more like brushfire in a clearing,

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everyone beating the brush with coats and hands,

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meanwhile the forest around us up in flames.

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What was it like? I was small, I was sick, I can’t remember much— [music] go study the graves.

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Dear Mattie, Did you have the garden turned? This morning early while I took my watch I heard a wood sparrow—the song’s the same no matter what they call them over here—

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remembered too when we were marching in, the cottonwoods and sycamores and popples, how fine they struck me coming from the ship after so much empty flat gray sky, on deck winds plowing up tremendous waves and down below half the batallion ill.

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Thirty-four we left behind in the sea and more fell in the road, it’s what took Pug. But there’s enough of us still and brave enough to finish this quickly off and hurry home.

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In my sister’s dream about the war the animals had clearly human expressions of grief and dread, maybe they were people wearing animal bodies, cows at the fence, hens in their nests. The older dog implored her at the door;

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she found the young one motionless on the grass, open-eyed, leg bitten off, the meat and muscles stripped back neatly from the jagged bone. For weeks I thought that was my fiancé, the mailbox was a shrine, I bargained with the little god inside—I didn’t know it was us she saw in the bloody trenches

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The barber, the teacher, the plumber, the preacher the man in a bowler, man in a cap, the banker, the baker, the cabinet-maker, the fireman, postman, clerk in the shop,

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soldier and sailor, teamster and tailor, man shoveling snow or sweeping his step, carpenter, cobbler, liar, lawyer, laid them down and never got up.

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O, O, the world wouldn’t stop— the neighborhood grocer, the neighborhood cop laid them down and never did rise.

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And some of their children, and some of their wives, fell into bed and never got up, fell into bed and never got up.

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You wiped a fever-brow, you burned the cloth. You scrubbed a sickroom floor, you burned the mop. What wouldn’t burn you boiled like applesauce out beside the shed in the copper pot. Apple, lightwood, linen, feather-bed— it was the smell of that time, that neighborhood. All night the pyre smoldered in the yard. Your job: to obliterate what had been soiled.

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But the bitten heart no longer cares for risk. The orthodox still passed from lip to lip the blessed relic and the ritual cup, To see in the pile the delicate pillowslip she’d worked by hand, roses and bluets—as if hope could be fed by giving up—

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Dear Mat, For the red scarf I’m much obliged. At first I couldn’t wear it—bright colors draw fire—but now I can. We took a shell where three of us were washing out our socks in a crater near my post. Good thing the sock was off my foot since the foot’s all to pieces now—don’t you fret, it could have been my head, I’ve seen that here, and then what use would be your pretty scarf?

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Victory will come soon but without me.

Home a week, he woke thinking he was back in France, under fire; then thought the house on fire, the noise and light, but that was from the fireworks and the torches on the square, a bonfire—everyone, in nightclothes, emptied from their houses, drawn toward a false dawn as from a cave— oh there was dancing in the streets all right, and singing

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he plunged into the crowd, tossed his crutch to the flames, kissed delirious strangers on each side.

Say he lived through one war but not the other.

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Who said the worst was past, who knew such a thing? Someone writing history, someone looking down on us from the clouds. Down here, snow and wind: cold blew through the clapboards, our spring was frozen in the frozen ground.

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Like the beasts in their holes, no one stirred—if not sick exhausted or afraid. In the village, the doctor’s own wife died in the night of the nineteenth, 1919.

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But it was true: at the window every afternoon toward the horizon, a little more light before the darkness fell.

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The bride is in the parlor, dear confection. Down on his knee at the edge of all that white, her father puts a penny in her shoe.

Under the stiff organza and the sash, the first cell of her first child slips into the chamber with a little click.

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After the paw withdraws, the world hums again, making its golden honey.

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[applause]