A Casualty List

Mary Carolyn Davies

There was always waiting in our mother’s eyes,
Anxiety and wonder and surmise,
Through the long days, and in the longer, slow,
Still afternoons, that seemed to never go,
And in the evening, when she used to sit
And listen to our casual talk, and knit.
And when the day was dark and rainy, and
Not fit to be abroad in, she would stand
Beside the window, and peer out and shiver,
As small sleek raindrops joined to make a river
That rushed, tempestuous, down the window pane,
And say, “I wonder what they do in rain?
Is it wet there in the trenches, do you think?”
And she would wonder if he had his ink
And razor blades and toothpaste that she sent;
And if he read much in his Testament,
Or clean forgot, some mornings, as boys will.
But always the one wonder in her eyes
Was, “Is he living, living, living, still
Alive and gay? Or lying dead somewhere
Out on the ground, and will they find him there?”
She closed her lids each night upon that look
Of waiting, as a hand might close a book
But never change the words that were within.
And when the morning noises would begin
A new day, and a young sun touched the skies,
Again she woke with waiting in her eyes.

But that is over now. She does not read
The lists of casualties, since that one came
A week or two ago. There is no need.
She’s making sweaters now for other men
And knitting just as carefully as then.
There is no change, except that as she plies
Her needles, swift and rhythmic as before,
There is no waiting in our mother’s eyes,
Anxiety or wonder any more.

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 7, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“A Casualty List” was published in Mary Carolyn Davies’s poetry collection The Drums in Our Street: A Book of War Poems (Macmillan, 1918), the same year World War I ended. She dedicated this volume to her three brothers—“Sergeant A. H. Davies: Company E, 4th Battalion, 20th Engineers, A.E.F.; Sergeant S. L. Davies: Company D, 6th Battalion, 20th Engineers, A.E.F.; Sergeant L. L. Davies: Base Hospital 46, A.E.F., Formerly Corporal, Seventieth Battery Canadian Field Artillery (discharged for wounds).” In “The American Literature of War: The Civil War, World War I, and World War II,” David Lundberg of Tufts University wrote, the “[American authors’] reaction to the war, and indeed the reaction of most writers and intellectuals of the twenties was part of a larger cultural rebellion that had begun before 1914. This ‘innocent rebellion,’ as Henry May has described it in The End of American Innocence (1959), began as a rejection of the smug optimism and confining moral standards of the nineteenth century. […] Eventually the war came to be a metaphor for all that was wrong with western civilization.”

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