A poem for Memorial Day

A poem for Memorial Day

Posted on May 24th, 2009 by Christopher Guerin

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.

Author Bio
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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.