Tonight’s {McNeil-Lehrer} NewsHour finished with a poem in place of the parade of lonely portraits of the dead. I found both the poem and its presentation moving, and I am taking the liberty of quoting it in full below.
However, I encourage everyone to go see, listen or read the original introduction and reading at the NewsHour website before reading my simple transcript below.
My simple transcript below is for the poetry purists who want to read it for themselves, without background or interpretation.
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.
