Poetry
“Has the United States ever apologized?
Or are we too big to apologize?”
—Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson
The Chaplains Handbook has no confiteor or rite,
neither Book of Common Prayer nor missalette,
for scrutinies that beg forgiveness from the torn
and desecrated dead. We come contrite
for reports of helicopter gunships,
bodies observed in a ditch, the undress
of a girl who covered only her eyes:
Noncombatant gang rape, with bayonet.
How to bring god closer
after the frenzy, the snarling riots,
this god hanging on a tree?
Do I stand here, as the story goes,
looking, do nothing, imagine
pouring myself toward him,
a flame across a field?
Or would I go there,
climb up, pry the first nails out
with the claw of a hammer,
wrap my arm tightly around his waist,
like my son I rescue from a branch too high?
I struggle to keep his weight on my hip,
his arm over my shoulder
while I wrest the other nails loose.
Smelling his sweat and tears,
I hoist him, lower him to the ground,
and then, with a wet cloth,
wash blood and dirt from his face,
tell him it will be all right now.
Enter this room and call it a cell.
Fold yourself and put yourself away.
For your whole life, you will be an amateur.
But be an amateur striving.
Enter this room and call it vigilance.
Make your ego the threadbare rug you walk on.
Before your quiet face, hold
the fane of your folded hands.
Fold yourself and put yourself away.
Become the parent to your parents.
Cast their names on the wind of your breathing.
Enter this room and be alone with dialogue.
Take the name of silence and let it speak.
In the beginning was the end
and in the end, silence
and the silence is God.
A way of binding books that will prevent
breaking of backs.
They steal more than our cash who steal our money, dropped bills
slipped in a finder’s pocket, a wallet emptied of its fill;
they steal a kinder world where we look out for each other,
call to know: How did your date, or, surgery go?
what do you call
a skeleton
unburied, performing
a slow dance
in the wind,
limbs akimbo?
Lay me down, oh lay me down bankside—
scratched by the blue wildrye, I hear the freshet-rush
of the river drunk on winter’s waters, what lie
it makes of a hushed name.
One by one the stars come up over the Mekong,
and the Buddhist novices,
finished with the evening prayers,
rush out to the water in their orange robes,
and stand with their hands over their eyes,
as if the light were too much for them.
Their master tells them,
Boys, if you want to dream to the stars
you must ask the universe as you go to sleep.
There’s a photo he carries for long journeys
like this one, for trips on loaded market lorries
where the passengers take their seat, perching
on top of cargo, or sitting on crude benches
inside the buses coming from Sudan with names
like “Best of Luck” or “Mr. Good Looking.”
The Greeks know how tightly coiled
are circumstances with many windings
before tragedy’s spring snaps.
The horse bolts flame-like from the gate;
we do not see its years of training.
So too, the thunderhead today slow bloating
and thickening with muffled rumblings.
The steeds were restless, but the reins
held tight, until a crack of the whip
unleashed the pummeling flood.