Bowled Over
By kiss of death, bullet on brow No more life can overpower That first infatuation, world cannot Ever be harder or clearer or come Closer than when it arrived there Spinning its patched fields, churches Trees where nightingales sang in broad daylight And the vast flaring blue skirts of seas – Then sudden insubordination Of boredom and sleep When the eyes could not find their keys Or the neck remember what mother whispered Or the body stand to its word Desertion in the face of a bullet! Burial without honors
Bowled Over - meaning Summary
Wonder Interrupted by Exhaustion
The poem contrasts an overwhelming first encounter with the world—vivid, immediate, and almost impossible to surpass—with a sudden collapse into boredom, sleep, and bodily confusion. Its speaker treats this loss of alertness as a kind of betrayal: the mind and body can no longer answer the world’s intensity. Images of bullets, desertion, and burial make ordinary exhaustion feel like a temporary defeat by death.
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