Survival: Infantry

by George Oppen

And the world changed.
There had been trees and people,
Sidewalks and roads

There were fish in the sea.

Where did all the rocks come from?
And the smell of explosives
Iron standing in mud
We crawled everywhere on the ground without seeing the earth again

We were ashamed of our half life and our misery; we saw that
        everything had died.

And the letters came. People who addressed us thru our lives
They left us gasping. And in tears
In the same mud in the terrible ground