Literary Diversion

I have decided when I have days like today, steeped in despondency, or when I'm feeling uninclined to write, I am going to share some smidgen of literature with you. Today's installment was written in the six years or so following the end of WWII, by a woman who was New York's State Poet from 1995-1997, and whose photo graces the beginning of today's post. I discovered her when I stopped to browse the used books for sale at the library many months ago.


Meteors

Whom can we love in all these little wars?
The aviator, king of his maps and glowing lights
But dispossessed of six-foot-two of ground?
The sailor, blind as a worm, suspended
In a hammock made of scrap iron, in his fear
Heavy and liquid to the touch as night?

Whom can we love? The same question
Asked five years back drops through my ear and dies
With a fizzle of brightness at the center of my brain.
The sky is streaked with pilots falling. I see
Buried in altitude like meteors
Cartoons of wit and sex, skeletons of leaders.

-Jane Cooper