As I searched for some poetry to share today, for comfort in a time of terrible loss, I found a poem from a book written in 2004 by Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry. I only read a few pages, admit I am not an expert on the entire book's premise and full content. Yet this particular part touched me. He writes: Yet poets in the 1950s in fact did write poems that set out to do precisely that which Lowell deemed to be the quintessential response to the bomb--to be a shield for their child. That is, poets in surprising numbers wrote pieces in which their primary role was not to speak in the voice of the professional or the sober analyst or the civic-minded intellectual but in the voice of the parent or the parent-surrogate whose very poem was being extended as an offering to a child as if it could be an act of sheltering. In none of these poems is the Bomb ever mentioned directly. But the extent to which a poem must include a direct reference to the Bomb in order to evoke its presence is always a problematic feature of poems about the Bomb. Consider Hyam Plutzik's six-line poem. . .which accomplishes its task nicely without mentioning the Bomb.
It was a time of stress during this time of the Cold War, but as children, we felt sheltered, taken care of. I wonder if we can say the same of children today? Here is Hyam Plutzik's poem:
And in the 51st Year of that Century, while My
Brother Cried in the Trench, while My Enemy
Glared from the Cave
This star is only an augury of the morning,
Gift-bearer of another day.
A wind has brought the musk of thirty fields,
Each like a coin of silver under that sky.
Precious, the soundless breathing of wife and children
In a house on a field lit by the morning star.
