Braun, Henry

United States, (1930-2014)

The Boar

  1. Once there was a boar hunted by all.
  2. Though some tempered spears and stayed at home
  3. and others baked bread for those who went along,
  4. staying at home themselves,
  5. everybody in his heart was hunting.
  6.  
  7. The boar was never taken,
  8. but ran in his wounds through the woods perpetually
  9. (I hear him running through those woods today,
  10. grunting and goring.)
  11.  
  12. There are many ways to hunt: the bravest
  13. get in among the still points of the spears,
  14. that woods within a woods where the boar is
  15. at the kill,
  16.  
  17. (though a kill never happens;
  18. for what is the great body loping through
  19. far glades of trees but the boar still?
  20. There is at best only a resurrection
  21. with all the bravest asleep round the new boar.)
  22.  
  23. The cowards make passes at the boar from afar
  24. and write the poetry of hunting.
  25.  
  26. A few, it is said, turn from blood though pressed
  27. even by their own blooded hearts’ unrest,
  28. and when the bakers bake, the slughorns blow,
  29. they neither spin nor sow.

 Henry Braun. The Vergil Woods. New York: Atheneum (1968).

About the Poet:

Henry Braun, Unites States, (1930-2014) was a poet, educator, and peace activist. He received his B.A. in French Literature from Brandeis University, spent a year in France on a Fulbright Scholarship, and returned to Brandeis for his M.A. He then spent several years in Boston as a social worker and a museum guide.

Braun taught literature and creative writing at Boston University and at the University of Maine. Later he was an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. He was also a Contributing Editor for the American Poetry Review. In 1968 his first poetry collection, The Vergil Woods, was published by Atheneum and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. [DES-11/19]