The most powerful work of public sculpture I’ve ever encountered is Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. I first visited it late one spring night in 1985 when I was 32. I was astonished at how many people were there at nearly midnight. I found the experience deeply and unexpectedly moving, not least because it caused me to think how lucky I’d been not to have to go to war myself. I wrote this poem soon after and left a copy of it at the Memorial when I returned a year later.

      The Vietnam War Memorial 

 

At night it seems a hole in the earth,

until you walk down; the black wall veers

to eye level and higher; the names multiply.

The hole becomes a precarious ledge

on a darkened corner of the world.

At the vertex, the shock descends,

like the percussion of monstrous hands:

the enormity, if not horror, of war dead.

 

I’m surprised to find a humane memorial

in spite of all that’s been said.

Each name has a voice we can touch,

trace with fingers, pronounce in the solemn

field of the mind; courage, death, stupidity,

are not reduced to three anonymous soldiers

no one ever mentioned in a prayer.

 

Who are these people at 11 p.m.?

I lose count at thirty, when I’m pushed

by a skinny youth, drunk, high perhaps,

stumbling up to the wall: “You taught me to smoke,”

he says, forehead pressing the black granite,

“I’m trying to quit. You’d want me to by now.”

 

I kneel, touch a poppy wired to a wreath,

strike a match to read a letter, typed, unsigned,

taped to the stem of the flower:

“I can’t forgive you for going but I

won’t forget I was your wife who let you.”

 

Lottery number three hundred and twelve

the year they took the first fifty-two,

I never had to choose, to go, or anything else:

this wall of names reproaches understanding.

 

 

 

 

 

Tweet  Print This Post

Tags: terror & war // Add Comment »