POEM
Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings
We drive between lakes just turning green;
Late June. The white turkeys have been moved
A second time to new grass.
How long the seconds are in great pain!
Terror just before death,
Shoulders torn, shot
From helicopters. “I saw the boy
being tortured with a telephone generator,”
The sergeant said.
“I felt sorry for him
And blew his head off with a shotgun.”
These instants become crystals,
Particles
The grass cannot dissolve. Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!
Therefore we will have to
Go far away
To atone
For the suffering of the stringy-chested
And the short rice-fed ones, quivering
In the helicopter like wild animals,
Shot in the chest, taken back to be questioned.
Robert Bly, “Driving through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1967 and renewed 1995 by Robert Bly. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Source: Selected Poems (1986)
Since the 1960s, Robert Bly has written poetry that is nonacademic, based in the natural world, the . . . MORE »
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