1943

1943 By Donald Hall

They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium
Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals, and ten months later Dom died
in the third wave at Tarawa. Every morning of the war

our Brock-Hall Dairy delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons
to wooden back porches in southern Connecticut. In winter,

frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,
Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into the Channel silt, or troops marched
-what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk.

What I got from this poem is so they were fighting during high-school and then tens months later they died in war. People back in America were living their lives like nothing was happening at all for they couldn't do anything about it.

"frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,
Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into the Channel Silt, or troops marched
-what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk."

So here he describes frozen cream lifts lids and while this is happened soldiers marched to death. Then he asks a question "what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk." Maybe he is referring back to the frozen cream and that cream can't if it is not unfrozen.

So I think that this poem is saying that even if young boys are dying we have to go with our lives because no matter what we do we can't save them.