Verbatim found poetry is an intriguing collection of found poems. Poems found in ordinary, and not so ordinary places. Submit yours.
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself
all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
At night the barracks sometimes lay in the moonlight
made out of silver and eternity: like a plaything
slipped from God’s preoccupied hand.
From Etty Hillesum’s diary, 23 September 1942.
it was raining a little bit all day
kinder drizzly and very damp
airplanes were buzzing overhead
most all the time jes like a lot of hornets
we seed quite a lot of our machinegun
battalion across the road from us
blowed up by the big shells
the woods were all mussed up
and looked as if a terrible cyclone
done swept through them
and all through the long night
those big guns flashed and growled
jes like the lightning and thunder
when it storms in the mountains at home
and oh, my! we had to pass the wounded
and some of them were on stretchers going
back to the dressing stations and some
were lying around moaning and twitching
and oh, my! the dead were all along the road
and their mouths were open and their eyes too
but they couldn’t see nothing no more nohow
i’m atelling you the little log cabin in wolf valley
in old tennessee seemed a long long way off
From Sergeant Alvin C. York’s diary, 7 October 1918.
But to-night I’ve been polite to a friend—
have guzzled vin ordinaire
+ puffed a Villar y Villar
and opened my dusty tobacco-jar—
and my nerves, as a consequence,
are a bit uneasy;
the thought of that soft star
comes on me most benignly.
To-morrow, however, I shall reassume
the scrutiny of things as they are.
(From Wallace Steven’s journal, October 1903)
A huge vista of life and suffering humankind
Siegfried Sassoon
which makes the present troubles easier to endure,
and the loneliness of death a little thing.
Clouds came down and blotted the landscape
and we squatted in a vineyard and smoked
our pipes by the blaze of dry olive-branches.
In the cloudy weather after rain
the clearness of the hills and glens
shifted from shadow to gleams of watery light
and the skylines were clean-cut
and delicate-edged. The hills looked green—
there was a look of Ireland about it.
And when we got home to camp
I found a letter from Dorothea,
the good soul, full of Limerick hunting,
and hounds flying over the big green banks.
Our padré rather drunk to-night
after all the communion wine he’d blessed
and been obliged to ‘finish up’.
And the news from remote France
grows more ominous every day.
(From Siegfried Sassoon’s diary, 1918)
She is
with us,
she is
of us—
the eternal
stillness
is
but a form
of her love.
1.
Nearly two out of every three
American soldiers is a Negro.
They seem to be everywhere.
2.
In the small town of Isigny
I saw a funeral parlor
displaying a coffin with a baby.
3.
I caught a glimpse of a 12-year old boy
in a barber shop shaving
a man five times his age.
4.
Castles of old Norman lords.
(Roi Ottley’s diary, 1944)
My life is a short, intense celebration.
With almost every breath I take, I get
a new sense and understanding
of the linden tree, of ripened wheat,
of hay, and of mignonette.
I suck everything up into me.
When it’s warm and I’m tired, I sit down
and weave a yellow garland, a blue one,
and one of thyme. A reaper in a blue smock.
He mows down all the little flowers
in front of my door. I know now of two
other pictures with death in them.
(From Paula Modersohn-Becker’s diary, 1900
Looking back,
Nella Last
I think the regret about the fruit salad
was stronger than fear of all being over.
All the day, the tinkle of glass
being swept up and dumped in ash-bins
like wind-bells in a temple,
together with the knock-knock
as anything handy was tacked
in place over gaping windows.
I look at a tin of fruit longingly,
now that fruit is so scarce.
Little sparrows had died as they crouched.
It looked as if they had bent
their little heads in prayer.
Not one falleth that He does not see.
Poles, Czechs, Greeks, all sparrows.
I’ve opened the tin of fruit salad,
and put my best embroidered cloth on,
and made an egg-whip instead of cream.
I’ll not take my clothes off tonight.
I’ll give the animals an aspirin.
(from Nella Last’s World War II diary, 1941)
Drove in a blue daze thru Kinderhook
with it almost raining.
Lights on in the stucco house.
Jason in a steep decline, screamed
is the damn house on the market,
you don’t need a sump pump.
Dust, sawdust, a week of spaghetti
glued on plates piled near the sink.
I try to make tea out of dust.
See my own house exploding like a baby
left alone in a house with no food
chewing on electric wires. By four
sawdust glues my eyelids together
and I curl into a cocoon of myself
under a quilt where it’s black.
I wake up dragged down too, wanting
to sleep thru the month
tho the bed smells of cats.
The pizza Jason brings onto the blue spread
dries. A pawmark hardens in it
like catprints in old bricks.
We put our names in the cement last August
and the cat’s paw on a day
it was too hot and humid to dry.
(From Lyn Lifshin’s Diary, 1977)
The sea has for several days
been growing angrier; and now
the muttering of its surf sounds
far into the land. It always
roughens thus during
the Festival of the Dead.
And on the sixteenth day,
after the shōryōbune have been launched,
all the fishermen remain at home.
For on that day the sea
is the highway of the dead.
Upon that day is it called Hotoke-umi—
the Buddha-Flood—the Tide
of the Returning Ghosts.
And ever upon the night
of that sixteenth day—
all its surface shimmers with faint lights
gliding out to the open,
and there is heard a murmuring of voices,
like the murmur of a city far-off—
the indistinguishable speech of souls.
Then will the dead rise tall,
and reach long hands and murmur:
Tago, tago o-kure!—tago o-kure!
(From the journal of Lafcadio Hearn, 1891)
Verbatim Poetry 
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