Poems For Our Parents

A couple of months ago, Dan and I decided that we wanted to record ourselves discussing poetry. The idea came about after we realized that our sweet parents were buying up our journals and chapbooks and using them as coffee table displays but never engaging us in conversation about the writing itself. Basically, we thought it would be a worthwhile endeavor to make a short podcast for each of our favorite poems, as if we were introducing these poems to our parents. While we're jazzed about the finished product (20 recordings), somewhere along the line, it became less "Poems for our Parents" and more "Poems for our Salty Little Sister at Boarding School."

Here's our discussion -- this particular one led by me -- of Yusef Komunyakaa's "Starlight Scope Myopia." We talked off the cuff, with no real notes or game plan. I could have said so much more about why I love this poem: the circling back to the ox cart in the final line, the slow transfiguration of impersonal shadows into individual men, the surprising temporal shift of "years after this scene" and its implied trauma. If you have any questions, please leave them as a comment!

Note to readers: a starlight scope actually looks like this and not this.




Starlight Scope Myopia

Gray-blue shadows lift
shadows onto an ox cart.

Making night work for us,
the starlight scope brings
men into killing range.

The river under Vi Bridge
takes the heart away

like the Water God
riding his dragon.
Smoke-colored

Viet Cong
move under our eyelids,

lords over loneliness
winding like coral vine through
sandalwood & lotus,

inside our lowered heads
years after this scene

ends. The brain closes
down. What looks like
one step into the trees,

they're lifting crates of ammo
& sacks of rice, swaying

under their shared weight.
Caught in the infrared,
what are they saying?

Are they talking about women
or calling the Americans

beaucoup dien cai dau?
One of them is laughing.
You want to place a finger

to his lips & say "shhhh."
You try reading ghost talk

on their lips. They say
"up-up we go," lifting as one.
This one, old, bowlegged,

you feel you could reach out
& take him into your arms. You

peer down the sights of your M-16,
seeing the full moon,
loaded onto an ox cart.