The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Bruce Guernsey
The Wall
Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home. Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet Nam sold those years, so many strange sounding places. One of us holds a magnifying glass to McCarroll, McMorris, McNabb, small print in the polished stone, the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga, Illinois, might have done, late at night searching that faraway land on his kitchen table, hearing again the morning paper thump against the front door, that boy on his bike in the dark grown and gone—what was his name, that kid from down the block?— Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |