The Stoic: For Laura Von Courten

All winter long you listened for the boom

Of distant cannon wheeled into their place.

Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon

You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace

Their careful webs against the boding sky,

While miles away on Munich’s vacant square

The bombs lunged down with an unruly cry

Whose blast you saw yet could but faintly hear.

And might have turned your eyes upon the gleam

Of a thousand years of snow, where near the clouds

The Alps ride massive to their full extreme,

And season after season glacier crowds

The dark, persistent smudge of conifers.

Or seen beyond the hedge and through the trees

The shadowy forms of cattle on the furze,

Their dim coats white with mist against the freeze.

Or thought instead of other times than these,

Of other countries and of other sights:

Eternal Venice sinking by degrees

Into the very water that she lights;

Reflected in canals, the lucid dome

Of Maria della Salute at your feet,

Her triple spires disfigured by the foam.

Remembered in Berlin the parks, the neat

Footpaths and lawns, the clean spring foliage,

Where just short weeks before, a bomb, unaimed,

Released a frightened lion from its cage,

Which in the mottled dark that trees enflamed

Killed one who hurried homeward from the raid.

And by yourself there standing in the chill

You must, with so much known, have been afraid

And chosen such a mind of constant will,

Which, though all time corrode with constant hurt,

Remains, until it occupies no space,

That which it is; and passionless, inert,

Becomes at last no meaning and no place.

Copyright Credit: Edgar Bowers, “The Stoic: For Laura Von Courten” from Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Edgar Bowers. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Edgar Bowers.

Source: Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997)