Five Points, Vol. 16, No. 3
Spring 2015From Philip Levine: "I think one of the luckiest things that happened to me was not publishing a book in a sizable edition, one which anybody saw, until I was forty."
Sample Content
Baron Wormser
Harrisong
Dead weight, gravity’s champions, metal missives of long distance, fascist hatred: the bombs fell on the inoffensive denizens, working class blokes and lasses, of the port of Liverpool. The endless brick buildings of the nineteenth and earlier centuries collapsed, tumbling in a rush, eager to surrender their proud forms, or fell more slowly like a regret come to light and regarded for some stunned seconds before giving way to implacable fact. The sky glowed yellow-orange, hearth of hell, inferno made real, yet formless darkness reached everywhere. Blackout because the night was not dark enough, blackout in the hearts and minds waiting for the all-clear while every manner of din broke loose—whistling, keening, exploding, droning, screaming, going bam-bam and ack-ack, and sounds that defied words, sounds that were the dire finale of music, the shards and shouts of explosive death, the world as Liverpool knew it become a nightly conflagration and cacophony, become the true pandemonium, the devil’s work.