Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BEREFT, by JAMES OPPENHEIM


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

BEREFT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Who can measure the agony of man?
Last Line: A fleck of shadow on immensity.
Subject(s): Social Protest


WHO can measure the agony of man?
There seem too many of us:
Too many millions: too great a multitude of needy beings:
Too myriad-hearted a need...
What sun, what rain shall feed this human grass of the Earth?

Alas! in the crowd I come and go, confused and wandering:
I cannot see a meaning in the tumult and disaster:
I cannot guess a triumphant purpose in this pinch of man-dust on this hidden planet...
As the street-crowds run from my bereaved spirit,
So crowds of the stars rush past, heedless of our trouble...
Yet it goes on:
Yet we have clothes on our back and food for our mouth,
And a thousand creeds pronounce their rival revelations,
And stout-hearted we go forth to fight in the morning
And lay us down at night, spent, spent...

All day they carry out the dead from the city, and all day the cry of the new-born echoes behind
the walls...
Youth is broken on the streets and the lovers part and the married hate and long for an ending:
Child against mother, son against father, the strong at the throats of the weak:
And every generation the annihilator of the generation that brought it to birth...

Havoc and disaster,
And a going down to graves and a last dissolution:
And the bleak winds of November blowing up from the seas,
And the Earth dismantled and dying, dying...

I that found thee in my soul and in the radiance of the sun,
Hide now alone, bereft: cut off:
A few pounds of human trouble:
A little wisp of darkness:
A fleck of shadow on immensity.





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