Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Civil War Face
    The Civil War Face
    The Civil War Face
    Ebook94 pages29 minutes

    The Civil War Face

    By Eric Thornton

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The human condition, awash in despair, desire, and degradation, is largely beyond the poet's ability to capture in words. The author, nonetheless, has made a feeble attempt to do so.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPage Publishing, Inc.
    Release dateMay 9, 2019
    ISBN9781644627594
    The Civil War Face

    Read more from Eric Thornton

    Related authors

    Related to The Civil War Face

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Tidal Man

      May 3, 2018

      The Tidal Man
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Epic Of Gilgamesh

      Jan 1, 2020

      My friends, who can reach heaven? The monster bellows like a river swollen with flood.Many are consumed in his fiery breath. My friends, who can reach heaven? Let us ask the mountain for a sign.Let us cut the spirits from the cedars. My friends, who

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      May 1, 2022

      —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting hi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Sep 1, 2020

      Five Poems
      4 min read

    • Article

      from BLACK PASTORAL

      Nov 1, 2023

      somewheres, some lifetimes ago I have run so far, so long.There is nowhere I haven’t beenBut here, in this field, a bodyLength from the ragged brinkThat gives way to forest.I collapsed here, the thin, hard slipOf me whittled at both ends.I want badly

      4 min read

    • Article

      Your Poetry

      Apr 29, 2022

      Email your poems to: (editorial@choicemag.co.uk) or post to Your Poetry, Choice, 4 Milnyard Square, Orton Southgate, Peterborough PE2 6GX I see you all, sitting there in rows.Singing hymns, as your tears do flow. But please don’t cry, not for me.For

      2 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2023

      And god created the waves and we the graves beneath, bodies madeparticulate by the force of water against water, water against rock, againsttime. I descend into the deep in a kind of prayer, listen to its centuries.Make me pay, will you, make me hurt

      3 min read

    • Article

      from 36 WAYS OF WRITING A VIETNAMESE POEM

      Feb 28, 2023

      You can’t go far wrong with violence.You’ll go far, my boy.You’ll cross oceans, my boy. Start with the Fall, go back or forth,Through bombs or boats,Across all the killing fields of thought. You can’t make it upBecause it’s all yours—by blood.By righ

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Final Truth

      Jan 21, 2020

      The Final Truth
      5 min read

    • Article

      Mountain Time

      Jan 1, 2021

      In the air you don’t know who you are or where My own self feels it is in wind being born These are currents a man made one eighth of smokeless fire fears but chooses A path south from Anchorage to a Mountain House Ungovern the northern land to pass

      10 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2019

      before I was one I heard every soundas a sound that had never been heard,before I was one I saw every lightas a light separate from dark, colorhidden in a place I had not been.Before I was one I used feet to wakenin water, to pedal through air,hands

      1 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Mar 4, 2019

      for William Gifford, 1928–2015 The river. Always the same, never the same.Poughkeepsie. A place north of where I am.To remember you is to remember Poughkeepsie.To remember Poughkeepsie is to remember the river.I am downriver now & you are a memoryI

      3 min read

    • Article

      Seven Poems

      May 1, 2022

      Seven Poems
      2 min read

    • Article

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all e

      4 min read

    • Article

      Summer: A Love Story

      Apr 20, 2021

      It is a squalid time. The body grows tired of being a body. Sweat. Always. A thin film of it on the skin. Do not say dewy. Do not say glisten. I dream of endless green. Of wet. Of rain hammering the Earth. Of buds sprouting. I want to insist on life

      2 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      followed—in front, as horses—into daisy& silver dancing, knowing the jaw who unkeysin the danced earth to drink me down to haints,& will go again. was willed. distrusted happiness, addicted to it.a god needs of a god. here, i don’t want to reachfor g

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Siren Song

      Nov 18, 2019

      The Siren Song
      5 min read

    • Article

      On Death Row, There's No Such Thing As Closure

      Aug 2, 2019

      It is August of the year 2000, and I am cold. I know the sun is shining outside, but there are no windows in the courtroom. The lighting is subdued, darker in the back where spectators sit and lighter in the front where tragedies play out—like a the

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Civil War Face

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Civil War Face - Eric Thornton

      The Days

      The days pass,

      Bleak winter comes.

      Souls come and go,

      Dusting the air unheeded.

      Little lives confront the universe,

      Go swish and are gone,

      Like winter’s breath.

      A Collection of Words

      The years creep upon my eternity

      Like the weight of the stars upon my bones.

      All resides within my beating heart,

      Which ceases and transforms me into the grass.

      There, death goes unrecorded,

      Except for the wind,

      Which etches my soul into the rock faces.

      I come to see myself more clearly now

      As my power wanes into a final irrelevancy.

      And I leap at it with an unbounded joy.

      The Crow

      Snow dusts the broken spines of corn.

      A crow pierces the air.

      But he cannot be seen.

      Lesser birds swoop down in small flocks

      Then vanish.

      The birds are always hungry.

      Men will tramp for hours in the cold to kill them.

      The sky is darkening.

      It glowers above the black trees at the field’s edge.

      The crow is there.

      There is a stark reality to this place,

      Which draws some men to it from their warm fires.

      Perhaps it is here that they can glimpse through some narrow window

      What they will become.

      Remember Me

      When I die,

      All my memories die too.

      And that is two deaths.

      But everything comes again

      In one way or another.

      And will you remember me?

      You who live temporarily and forever.

      How sad and exhilarating

      That we shall pass

      As the universe watches silently.

      What does it remember?

      It remembers me.

      For we are one and the same.

      And if I have a spirit,

      It is everything and everywhere.

      It is the leaves and the stars and the seas.

      I am remembrance itself.

      Pages of Dust

      Oh, these kings, murdering,

      Murdered in tattered, fragile leaves

      Of human suffering without end.

      Cruelty and dazzling jewels of

      Greed and pompous arrogance holding sway

      Over every man-child

      Arisen from beds of eager opening procreation.

      Each babe precious and transient

      As the stars that flame across

      The fleeting blackness.

      The Sea

      Oh, how I love to go down to the sea,

      Down to the sea and its men,

      To the rotting wharves, where the sailors shout,

      Shout things beyond my ken.

      Where the sea is black, a black frothy sea,

      The air of a briny taste.

      And its bosom swells, enfolding all,

      All of the lives it did waste.

      The black-white waves and

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1