Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MEMORIES IN HOSPITAL, by ALFRED HERMAN FRIEDRICH VAGTS


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MEMORIES IN HOSPITAL, by                    
First Line: The beds are hutches, snow-frozen, where I lie, leaking away
Last Line: That bends above my couch, again and yet again.
Subject(s): Hospitals; World War I - Casualties


The beds are hutches, snow-frozen, where I lie, leaking away.

As I fall, stars become golden eels, and hang in the twisted telegraph wires.
My wound is a battered door in my body;
over any hump of my body troops climb out of my back into the morning.
Meadows and marshes grow into my boots;
earth will not let me go: I am a fragment of her hibernal sleep.
A tent of memories blows open and rests cloudily upon an abandoned pyramid of
guns:
my home-village moves towards its church-tower,
hands come down, red-stained, from a cross, and find me.
The sobs of a motor are mingled with mine.
Out of the river-valley, distance lifts its short-necked head;
its head falls, and on the bleeding trunk a town burns.

The new dressing for my wound holds me like a blue scarf of sky;
my eyelids feel the warm breath of a pure presence
that bends above my couch, again and yet again.





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