Audio Link To Listen To Wyatt’s Own Words
March 21, 2006
Wyatt Prunty, who served in the Vietnam war, was inspired to write a poem based on the NewsHour’s Honor Roll of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The poem is called: “The Returning Dead.”
The Returning Dead
Each night I make a drink and wait for them
They have become the day’s concluding news,
Installments from a world without anthems
Or children, unfocusing eyes
A question that repeatedly rejects
My easy terms. They are ones who believed
And acted in the narrow and select
Ways handed them, while ordinary lives
Ran on without interruption
Or bad pictures, as though nothing had changed
Change is the one unanswerable question
Of these faces. The world can rearrange
Itself repeatedly, but these remain
The same, silent in everything they lack;
That’s what they’ve come to, in places with names
Like Afghanistan, Iraq,
And this is the way it happens: the words
Are old – mother, father, home – and will catch
Surrounding currents in the slow absurd
Descending will of any river etched
Out of a landscape history refines
To myth. The TV blanks between
Segments, but every static face defines
Itself, holds stubbornly its private scene…
Fixed, publicly, as we are led
Back to that little negative whose lack
Is each of us, staring the staring dead,
Leaning, sometimes like grief itself; then straightening back.
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The ‘HONOR ROLL’ {Link Also At Poem Site}:
This is a Silent Honor Roll shown on the PBS ‘News Hour’, now Almost Daily, that was started at the Beginning!
As of Today, 3-22-06 there are 59 Pages with 5 ‘Honor Roll’ links per page!
If you take the Time to View ‘ALL’ the Pages/Photo’s and Information Instill This Thought Into Each American Military Face You See, ‘Try and Picture 30, 40, 50, 60, 100 or More Iraqi Faces, Children-Women-Men, Killed for Each Of These Faces You Are Looking At’
