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Best Famous Concentration Poems

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Written by David Lehman | Create an image from this poem

A Little History

 Some people find out they are Jews.
They can't believe it.
Thy had always hated Jews.
As children they had roamed in gangs on winter nights in the old neighborhood, looking for Jews.
They were not Jewish, they were Irish.
They brandished broken bottles, tough guys with blood on their lips, looking for Jews.
They intercepted Jewish boys walking alone and beat them up.
Sometimes they were content to chase a Jew and he could elude them by running away.
They were happy just to see him run away.
The coward! All Jews were yellow.
They spelled Jew with a small j jew.
And now they find out they are Jews themselves.
It happened at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.
To escape persecution, they pretended to convert to Christianity.
They came to this country and settled in the Southwest.
At some point oral tradition failed the family, and their secret faith died.
No one would ever have known if not for the bones that turned up on the dig.
A disaster.
How could it have happened to them? They are in a state of panic--at first.
Then they realize that it is the answer to their prayers.
They hasten to the synagogue or build new ones.
They are Jews at last! They are free to marry other Jews, and divorce them, and intermarry with Gentiles, God forbid.
They are model citizens, clever and thrifty.
They debate the issues.
They fire off earnest letters to the editor.
They vote.
They are resented for being clever and thrifty.
They buy houses in the suburbs and agree not to talk so loud.
They look like everyone else, drive the same cars as everyone else, yet in their hearts they know they're different.
In every minyan there are always two or three, hated by the others, who give life to one ugly stereotype or another: The grasping Jew with the hooked nose or the Ivy League Bolshevik who thinks he is the agent of world history.
But most of them are neither ostentatiously pious nor excessively avaricious.
How I envy them! They believe.
How I envy them their annual family reunion on Passover, anniversary of the Exodus, when all the uncles and aunts and cousins get together.
They wonder about the heritage of Judaism they are passing along to their children.
Have they done as much as they could to keep the old embers burning? Others lead more dramatic lives.
A few go to Israel.
One of them calls Israel "the ultimate concentration camp.
" He tells Jewish jokes.
On the plane he gets tipsy, tries to seduce the stewardess.
People in the Midwest keep telling him reminds them of Woody Allen.
He wonders what that means.
I'm funny? A sort of nervous intellectual type from New York? A Jew? Around this time somebody accuses him of not being Jewish enough.
It is said by resentful colleagues that his parents changed their name from something that sounded more Jewish.
Everything he publishes is scrutinized with reference to "the Jewish question.
" It is no longer clear what is meant by that phrase.
He has already forgotten all the Yiddish he used to know, and the people of that era are dying out one after another.
The number of witnesses keeps diminishing.
Soon there will be no one left to remind the others and their children.
That is why he came to this dry place where the bones have come to life.
To live in a state of perpetual war puts a tremendous burden on the population.
As a visitor he felt he had to share that burden.
With his gift for codes and ciphers, he joined the counter- terrorism unit of army intelligence.
Contrary to what the spook novels say, he found it possible to avoid betraying either his country or his lover.
This was the life: strange bedrooms, the perfume of other men's wives.
As a spy he has a unique mission: to get his name on the front page of the nation's newspaper of record.
Only by doing that would he get the message through to his immediate superior.
If he goes to jail, he will do so proudly; if they're going to hang him anyway, he'll do something worth hanging for.
In time he may get used to being the center of attention, but this was incredible: To talk his way into being the chief suspect in the most flamboyant murder case in years! And he was innocent! He could prove it! And what a book he would write when they free him from this prison: A novel, obliquely autobiographical, set in Vienna in the twilight of the Hapsburg Empire, in the year that his mother was born.


Written by Walt Whitman | Create an image from this poem

Thoughts

 1
OF these years I sing, 
How they pass and have pass’d, through convuls’d pains as through parturitions; 
How America illustrates birth, muscular youth, the promise, the sure fulfillment, the
 Absolute
 Success, despite of people—Illustrates evil as well as good; 
How many hold despairingly yet to the models departed, caste, myths, obedience,
 compulsion, and
 to infidelity; 
How few see the arrived models, the Athletes, the Western States—or see freedom or
 spirituality—or hold any faith in results,
(But I see the Athletes—and I see the results of the war glorious and
 inevitable—and
 they again leading to other results;) 
How the great cities appear—How the Democratic masses, turbulent, wilful, as I love
 them; 
How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the sounding and resounding,
 keep on
 and on; 
How society waits unform’d, and is for awhile between things ended and things begun; 
How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of freedom, and of the
 Democracies,
 and of the fruits of society, and of all that is begun;
And how The States are complete in themselves—And how all triumphs and glories are
 complete in themselves, to lead onward, 
And how these of mine, and of The States, will in their turn be convuls’d, and serve
 other
 parturitions and transitions, 
And how all people, sights, combinations, the Democratic masses, too, serve—and how
 every
 fact, and war itself, with all its horrors, serves, 
And how now, or at any time, each serves the exquisite transition of death.
2 OF seeds dropping into the ground—of birth, Of the steady concentration of America, inland, upward, to impregnable and swarming places, Of what Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and the rest, are to be, Of what a few years will show there in Nebraska, Colorado, Nevada, and the rest; (Or afar, mounting the Northern Pacific to Sitka or Aliaska;) Of what the feuillage of America is the preparation for—and of what all sights, North, South, East and West, are; Of This Union, soak’d, welded in blood—of the solemn price paid—of the unnamed lost, ever present in my mind; —Of the temporary use of materials, for identity’s sake, Of the present, passing, departing—of the growth of completer men than any yet, Of myself, soon, perhaps, closing up my songs by these shores, Of California, of Oregon—and of me journeying to live and sing there; Of the Western Sea—of the spread inland between it and the spinal river, Of the great pastoral area, athletic and feminine, of all sloping down there where the fresh free giver, the mother, the Mississippi flows, Of future women there—of happiness in those high plateaus, ranging three thousand miles, warm and cold; Of mighty inland cities yet unsurvey’d and unsuspected, (as I am also, and as it must be;) Of the new and good names—of the modern developments—of inalienable homesteads; Of a free and original life there—of simple diet and clean and sweet blood; Of litheness, majestic faces, clear eyes, and perfect physique there; Of immense spiritual results, future years, far west, each side of the Anahuacs; Of these leaves, well understood there, (being made for that area;) Of the native scorn of grossness and gain there; (O it lurks in me night and day—What is gain, after all, to savageness and freedom?)
Written by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot | Create an image from this poem

Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton

 I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.
My words echo Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.
Other echoes Inhabit the garden.
Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner.
Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible, Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves, In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air, And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, Along the empty alley, into the box circle, To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
II Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars Ascend to summer in the tree We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before But reconciled among the stars.
At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement.
And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered.
Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline.
Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire, The release from action and suffering, release from the inner And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving, Erhebung without motion, concentration Without elimination, both a new world And the old made explicit, understood In the completion of its partial ecstasy, The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future Woven in the weakness of the changing body, Protects mankind from heaven and damnation Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, The moment in the draughty church at smokefall Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
III Here is a place of disaffection Time before and time after In a dim light: neither daylight Investing form with lucid stillness Turning shadow into transient beauty With slow rotation suggesting permanence Nor darkness to purify the soul Emptying the sensual with deprivation Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy.
Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind That blows before and after time, Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls Into the faded air, the torpid Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London, Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney, Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.
Not here Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Descend lower, descend only Into the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; This is the one way, and the other Is the same, not in movement But abstention from movement; while the world moves In appetency, on its metalled ways Of time past and time future.
IV Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling? Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.
V Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die.
Words, after speech, reach Into the silence.
Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Shrieking voices Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering, Always assail them.
The Word in the desert Is most attacked by voices of temptation, The crying shadow in the funeral dance, The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.
The detail of the pattern is movement, As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.
Written by Mark Doty | Create an image from this poem

Metro North

 Over the terminal,
 the arms and chest
 of the god

brightened by snow.
Formerly mercury, formerly silver, surface yellowed by atmospheric sulphurs acid exhalations, and now the shining thing's descendant.
Obscure passages, dim apertures: these clouded windows show a few faces or some empty car's filmstrip of lit flames --remember them from school, how they were supposed to teach us something?-- waxy light hurrying inches away from the phantom smudge of us, vague in spattered glass.
Then daylight's soft charcoal lusters stone walls and we ascend to what passes for brightness, this February, scumbled sky above graduated zones of decline: dead rowhouses, charred windows' wet frames around empty space, a few chipboard polemics nailed over the gaps, speeches too long and obsessive for anyone on this train to read, sealing the hollowed interiors --some of them grand once, you can tell by the fillips of decoration, stone leaves, the frieze of sunflowers.
Desolate fields--open spaces, in a city where you can hardly turn around!-- seem to center on little flames, something always burning in a barrel or can As if to represent inextinguishable, dogged persistence? Though whether what burns is will or rage or harsh amalgam I couldn't say.
But I can tell you this, what I've seen that won my allegiance most, though it was also the hallmark of our ruin, and quick as anything seen in transit: where Manhattan ends in the narrowing geographical equivalent of a sigh (asphalt, arc of trestle, dull-witted industrial tanks and scaffoldings, ancient now, visited by no one) on the concrete embankment just above the river, a sudden density and concentration of trash, so much I couldn't pick out any one thing from our rising track as it arced onto the bridge over the fantastic accumulation of jetsam and contraband strewn under the uncompromising vault of heaven.
An unbelievable mess, so heaped and scattered it seemed the core of chaos itself-- but no, the junk was arranged in rough aisles, someone's intimate clutter and collection, no walls but still a kind of apartment and a fire ribboned out of a ruined stove, and white plates were laid out on the table beside it.
White china! Something was moving, and --you understand it takes longer to tell this than to see it, only a train window's worth of actuality-- I knew what moved was an arm, the arm of the (man or woman?) in the center of that hapless welter in layer upon layer of coats blankets scarves until the form constituted one more gray unreadable; whoever was lifting a hammer, and bringing it down again, tapping at what work I couldn't say; whoever, under the great exhausted dome of winter light, which the steep and steel surfaces of the city made both more soft and more severe, was making something, or repairing, was in the act (sheer stubborn nerve of it) of putting together.
Who knows what.
(And there was more, more I'd take all spring to see.
I'd pick my seat and set my paper down to study him again --he, yes, some days not at home though usually in, huddled by the smoldering, and when my eye wandered --five-second increments of apprehension--I saw he had a dog! Who lay half in half out his doghouse in the rain, golden head resting on splayed paws.
He had a ruined car, and heaps of clothes, and things to read-- was no emblem, in other words, but a citizen, who'd built a citizen's household, even on the literal edge, while I watched from my quick, high place, hurtling over his encampment by the waters of Babylon.
) Then we were gone, in the heat and draft of our silver, rattling over the river into the South Bronx, against whose greasy skyline rose that neoned billboard for cigarettes which hostages my attention, always, as it is meant to do, its motto ruby in the dark morning: ALIVE WITH PLEASURE.
Written by Billy Collins | Create an image from this poem

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

 In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,
his hair tied in a knot,
a model of concentration.
Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does, or does not do.
Even the season is wrong for him.
In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid? Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe? But here we are, working our way down the driveway, one shovelful at a time.
We toss the light powder into the clear air.
We feel the cold mist on our faces.
And with every heave we disappear and become lost to each other in these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain-bursts of snow.
This is so much better than a sermon in church, I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling.
This is the true religion, the religion of snow, and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky, I say, but he is too busy to hear me.
He has thrown himself into shoveling snow as if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway you could back the car down easily and drive off into the vanities of the world with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio.
All morning long we work side by side, me with my commentary and he inside his generous pocket of silence, until the hour is nearly noon and the snow is piled high all around us; then, I hear him speak.
After this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards? Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk and bring cups of hot chocolate to the table while you shuffle the deck.
and our boots stand dripping by the door.
Aaah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes and leaning for a moment on his shovel before he drives the thin blade again deep into the glittering white snow.


Written by Robert Lowell | Create an image from this poem

Memories of West Street and Lepke

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's 
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican.
" I have a nine months' daughter, young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.
These are the tranquilized Fifties, and I am forty.
Ought I to regret my seedtime? I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.
O.
, and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a ***** boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair.
Given a year, I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short enclosure like my school soccer court, and saw the Hudson River once a day through sooty clothesline entanglements and bleaching khaki tenements.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz, a jaundice-yellow ("it's really tan") and fly-weight pacifist, so vegetarian, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown, the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban, wearing chocolate double-breasted suits, they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.
I was so out of things, I'd never heard of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.
O.
?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.
W.
" He taught me the "hospital tuck," and pointed out the T-shirted back of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepke, there piling towels on a rack, or dawdling off to his little segregated cell full of things forbidden to the common man: a portable radio, a dresser, two toy American flags tied together with a ribbon of Easter palm.
Flabby, bald, lobotomized, he drifted in a sheepish calm, where no agonizing reappraisal jarred his concentration on the electric chair hanging like an oasis in his air of lost connections.
.
.
.
Written by Tony Hoagland | Create an image from this poem

Reading Moby-Dick at 30000 Feet

 At this height, Kansas
is just a concept,
a checkerboard design of wheat and corn

no larger than the foldout section
of my neighbor's travel magazine.
At this stage of the journey I would estimate the distance between myself and my own feelings is roughly the same as the mileage from Seattle to New York, so I can lean back into the upholstered interval between Muzak and lunch, a little bored, a little old and strange.
I remember, as a dreamy backyard kind of kid, tilting up my head to watch those planes engrave the sky in lines so steady and so straight they implied the enormous concentration of good men, but now my eyes flicker from the in-flight movie to the stewardess's pantyline, then back into my book, where men throw harpoons at something much bigger and probably better than themselves, wanting to kill it, wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt to prove that they exist.
Imagine being born and growing up, rushing through the world for sixty years at unimaginable speeds.
Imagine a century like a room so large, a corridor so long you could travel for a lifetime and never find the door, until you had forgotten that such a thing as doors exist.
Better to be on board the Pequod, with a mad one-legged captain living for revenge.
Better to feel the salt wind spitting in your face, to hold your sharpened weapon high, to see the glisten of the beast beneath the waves.
What a relief it would be to hear someone in the crew cry out like a gull, Oh Captain, Captain! Where are we going now?
Written by John Betjeman | Create an image from this poem

Middlesex

 Gaily into Ruislip Gardens
Runs the red electric train,
With a thousand Ta's and Pardon's
Daintily alights Elaine;
Hurries down the concrete station
With a frown of concentration,
Out into the outskirt's edges
Where a few surviving hedges
Keep alive our lost Elysium - rural Middlesex again.
Well cut Windsmoor flapping lightly, Jacqmar scarf of mauve and green Hiding hair which, Friday nightly, Delicately drowns in Dreen; Fair Elaine the bobby-soxer, Fresh-complexioned with Innoxa, Gains the garden - father's hobby - Hangs her Windsmoor in the lobby, Settles down to sandwich supper and the television screen.
Gentle Brent, I used to know you Wandering Wembley-wards at will, Now what change your waters show you In the meadowlands you fill! Recollect the elm-trees misty And the footpaths climbing twisty Under cedar-shaded palings, Low laburnum-leaned-on railings Out of Northolt on and upward to the heights of Harrow hill.
Parish of enormous hayfields Perivale stood all alone, And from Greenford scent of mayfields Most enticingly was blown Over market gardens tidy, Taverns for the bona fide, Cockney singers, cockney shooters, Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters, Long in Kelsal Green and Highgate silent under soot and stone.
Written by Vernon Scannell | Create an image from this poem

Schoolroom On A Wet Afternoon

 The unrelated paragraphs of morning
Are forgotten now; the severed heads of kings
Rot by the misty Thames; the roses of York
And Lancaster are pressed between the leaves
Of history; ******* sleep in Africa.
The complexities of simple interest lurk In inkwells and the brittle sticks of chalk: Afternoon is come and English Grammar.
Rain falls as though the sky has been bereaved, Stutters its inarticulate grief on glass Of every lachrymose pane.
The children read Their books or make pretence of concentration, Each bowed head seems bent in supplication Or resignation to the fate that waits In the unmapped forests of the future.
Is it their doomed innocence noon weeps for? In each diminutive breast a human heart Pumps out the necessary blood: desires, Pains and ecstasies surf-ride each singing wave Which breaks in darkness on the mental shores.
Each child is disciplined; absorbed and still At his small desk.
Yet lift the lid and see, Amidst frayed books and pencils, other shapes: Vicious rope, glaring blade, the gun cocked to kill.
Written by Louise Gluck | Create an image from this poem

Widows

 My mother's playing cards with my aunt,
Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game
my grandmother taught all her daughters.
Midsummer: too hot to go out.
Today, my aunt's ahead; she's getting the good cards.
My mother's dragging, having trouble with her concentration.
She can't get used to her own bed this summer.
She had no trouble last summer, getting used to the floor.
She learned to sleep there to be near my father.
He was dying; he got a special bed.
My aunt doesn't give an inch, doesn't make allowance for my mother's weariness.
It's how they were raised: you show respect by fighting.
To let up insults the opponent.
Each player has one pile to the left, five cards in the hand.
It's good to stay inside on days like this, to stay where it's cool.
And this is better than other games, better than solitaire.
My grandmother thought ahead; she prepared her daughters.
They have cards; they have each other.
They don't need any more companionship.
All afternoon the game goes on but the sun doesn't move.
It just keeps beating down, turning the grass yellow.
That's how it must seem to my mother.
And then, suddenly, something is over.
My aunt's been at it longer; maybe that's why she's playing better.
Her cards evaporate: that's what you want, that's the object: in the end, the one who has nothing wins.

Book: Shattered Sighs