1943

1943

They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium
Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals, and ten months later Dom died
in the third wave at Tarawa. Every morning of the war

our Brock-Hall Dairy delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons
to wooden back porches in southern Connecticut. In winter,

frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,
Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into Channel silt, or troops marched
—what could we do?—with frostbitten feet as white as milk.

—Donald Hall

This is a poem about WWII. It is saying that the people prepared for going to war, and died, and for the people back in America, life went on as normal while people died, and they couldn't do anything back home to help stop people dying. This is sort of like today's war, where nobody in America can do much to support the troops besides just saying we support them. In WWII, people collected scrap metal and made clothing and grew vegetables and things for the people fighting. Today, we do not. Also, life continues as normal for us, too, even more than the war in which the poem is about (no rationing or anything). I think it is like this for most wars fought away from the mother country, because the citizens themselves are not in danger. When a war is fought within or very near the borders of the mother country, though, people are more concerned and do more and their lives change.