On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck

ON THE DEBT MY MOTHER OWED TO SEARS ROEBUCK ED DORN (1929-1999)

Summer was dry, dry the garden our beating hearts, on that farm, dry with the rows of corn the grasshoppers came happily to strip, in hordes, the first thing I knew about locust was they came 5 dry under the foot like the breaking of a mechanical bare heart which collapses from an unkind an incessant word whispered incessant= ______in the house of the major farmer and the catalog company, 10 from no fault of anyone my father coming home tired and grinning down the road, turning in is the tank full? thinking of the horse and my lazy arms thinking of the water so far below the well platform. 15

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck we brooded, she in the house, a little heavy from too much corn meal, she a little melancholy from the dust of the fields in her eye, the only title she ever had to lands— 20 and man’s ways winged their way to her through the mail saying so much per month so many months, this is yours, take it take it, take it, take it and in the corncrib, like her lives in that house 25 the mouse nibbled away at the cob’s yellow grain until six o’clock when her sorrows grew less and my father came home

On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck? I have nothing to say, it gave me clothes to 30 wear to school, and my mother brooded in the rooms of the house, the kitchen, waiting for the men she new, her husband, her son from work, from school, from the air of locusts 35 and dust masking the hedges of fields she knew in her eye as a vague land where she lived, boundaries, whose tractors chugged pulling harrows harrow= agriculture spike-like tool pulling discs, pulling great yields of the earth pulse for the armies in two hemispheres, 1943 40 pulse= legumes (beans, peas, etc.) and she was part of that stay at home army to keep things going, owing that debt. High Flight John Gillespie Magee (1922-1941), a Canadian Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britian

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there, I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious burning blue I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew. And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES

By Siegfried Sassoon

I knew a simple soldier boy Who grinned at life in empty joy, Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum, With crumps and lice and lack of rum, He put a bullet through his brain. No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye Who cheer when soldier lads march by, Sneak home and pray you'll never know The hell where youth and laughter go.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.