I’ve been thinking a lot about war lately, because our juniors read The Things They Carried as summer reading, so we’ve been going over it to begin the year. I really enjoy teaching this book, and the students are usually engaged as well, and we spend hours talking about these young men marching off to a conflict they don’t understand, with roots that stretch back centuries, and how it changes and contorts them in ways they could never have expected.
Today I gave them some war poetry and told them to respond to it over the weekend, and I thought some of it would be appropriate to post today.
GRASS
Carl Sandburg
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,
Shovel them under and let me work–
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
