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Bombing for peace
I smell ugly money
on the other side of murder
they promising security
secure a cave made by hand
like wind in a paper country
this business of war
Poems on the topic: murder
Poems on the topic “murder” on Poets.by.
Solicidal
I find a man talking
of murdering the sun
like a bat in the palace.
He went to London
to hang like a picture,
all gilt and ash.
The Man You Just Passed
No clear origin,
No obvious direction.
Thick-thighed, big-bellied,
Heavy buttocked, hairy,
Squat, a working man,
Head set directly into chest,
Upright. Upright looking
Skyward, looking earthward,
Averting eyes, looking deeply
Into eyes, burning to look
Deeply, to reach out to you
In the pride of his youth.
Upright. Arms uncomfortable
At his sides, gesturing,
Grunting out of a cave,
Ice-driven into shelter,
White Noise
I can't hear anything
it's all just white noise
but I needed groceries
everyone is looking at me
like
it
was
me
that murdered
her.
The Lover
All night she walked and dreamed on the frozen road,
She the insane one, feeling not thinking.
All night she walked and wanted to Kill,
Wanted to love and kill.
What did she want?
Nobody knew.
None of us knew why she wanted
To kill.
We were the heavy ones, heavy and sure.
The wind in the cornfields moved us not.
We the Americans, worthy and sure,
Worthy and sure of ourselves.
Tom killed his brother on Wednesday night,
Back of the corncrib, under the hill.
Then she ran to him, sobbing and calling,
She who had loved and could not kill.
The Tavern
Whenever I go by there nowadays
And look at the rank weeds and the strange grass,
The torn blue curtains and the broken glass,
I seem to be afraid of the old place;
And something stiffens up and down my face,
For all the world as if I saw the ghost
Of old Ham Amory, the murdered host,
With his dead eyes turned on me all aglaze.
The Tavern has a story, but no man
Can tell us what it is. We only know
That once long after midnight, years ago,
A stranger galloped up from Tilbury Town,
Who brushed, and scared, and all but overran
That skirt-crazed reprobate, John Evereldown.
Barry Holden
The very fall my sister Nancy Knapp
Set fire to the house
They were trying Dr. Duval
For the murder of Zora Clemens,
And I sat in the court two weeks
Listening to every witness.
It was clear he had got her in a family way;
And to let the child be born
Would not do.
Well, how about me with eight children,
And one coming, and the farm
Mortgaged to Thomas Rhodes?
And when I got home that night,
(After listening to the story of the buggy ride,
And the finding of Zora in the ditch,)
The first thing I saw, right there by the steps,
Tom Merritt
At first I suspected something—
She acted so calm and absent-minded.
And one day I heard the back door shut
As I entered the front, and I saw him slink
Back of the smokehouse into the lot
And run across the field.
And I meant to kill him on sight.
But that day, walking near Fourth Bridge
Without a stick or a stone at hand,
All of a sudden I saw him standing
Scared to death, holding his rabbits,
And all I could say was, “Don’t, Don’t, Don’t,”
As he aimed and fired at my heart.
Rosie Roberts
I was sick, but more than that, I was mad
At the crooked police, and the crooked game of life.
So I wrote to the Chief of Police at Peoria:
“I am here in my girlhood home in Spoon River,
Gradually wasting away.
But come and take me, I killed the son
Of the merchant prince, in Madam Lou’s
And the papers that said he killed himself
In his home while cleaning a hunting gun—
Lied like the devil to hush up scandal
For the bribe of advertising.
In my room I shot him, at Madam Lou’s,
Because he knocked me down when I said
That, in spite of all the money he had,
I’d see my lover that night.”
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