Appreciation of American poet Susan Stewart’s poem ‘May 1988’

Appreciation of American poet Susan Stewart’s poem ‘May 1988’ I request readers to read the poem from the link https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/may88.html and my review next. Thanks. The poem’s strength is it is on a specific month ‘May 1988’ during which Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan her soldiers as committed in the ‘Geneva accord’ in 1987. The poem is a straight one and does not need the reviewer’s interpretation of any stanza. I find the following expressions very poetic: In the first stanza there is‘the anarchic old flag’. There is no hint whatsoever which flat she points to. The flag is metaphor for the institutions in general. If political centres of power promote war, the finance system of civilians expands the divide between haves and have-nots. In this stanza she lists some people events, happenings around who go unnoticed: The egg that breaks on the way from the market, the straw that breaks as it breaks down the load, the meter that stops and the battery stalling, the refusals of time, the spies lost in the snow. Very carefully chosen metaphors like the eggs that got broken in transit or the overload of straw or the meters that stopped highlight the unknown stories of the spies who get lost in a foreign soil. This is really a model for writing a powerful poem for newcomer poets. In the last stanza the people who wait for darkness to move about subtly indicates how war impacts adversely civilian life. An American poet is empathetic about the homecoming soldiers of Soviet Russia. This makes the reader understand literature and a writer are never restricted to geographical boundaries. The last stanza empathises with the public, the civilians who are worst affected in any war. Poems on the impact of war are rare and poems on a specific historical event are rarer. Such poems archive what historians have always been incapacitated to. Literature depicts the life of the scores of common men and women while history diarises some events and records the centres of power left for the next gen.