Peter Filkins Poems

Many years later, while contemplating beauty
as order, he would think of them: gamecocks
sharpening their claws for a scrap, and how
...

Be it a whisper, be it a raspy cough,
whatever sets it off is soon forgotten,
the high faint rumble at first mistaken
for an airplane's passing roar, a gust of wind
...

I

When Hitler married Eva Braun
just days before committing suicide,
the war now lost, the Allies advancing,
...

for James Lasdun

'Topped, dropped & chipped 2 dead white birch trees'
reads the bill arriving one week later.
The damage? 'Labor & Equipment - $250,'
...

Daniel Pearl (1963-2002)

My father was a Jew, my mother was a Jew,
and yet just what that means for me
I'm not really sure, are you?
...

Outside my window, a man running.
Though it's mid-winter, ten above,
he stays the course, determined
...

Mata Hari, for the first time since she had been arrested, began to see the futility
of the efforts to save her.... People whom she knew innocently had become dangerous
companions; conversations which were private and intimate had become acts
...

Blue tilted pupil
staring at heaven,
a child's small hand
can set you spinning.
...

for Susan

Dawn's tender light
shatters to a blast
of shotguns on the lake,
...

Was it Kiki or Heinz with whom we hitched
that ride from Hamburg to Berlin
twenty years ago, the sun setting across
the barren expanse of the Prussian march
...