Selective Service

By Carolyn Forché b. 1950 Carolyn Forche

We rise from the snow where we’ve

lain on our backs and flown like children,

from the imprint of perfect wings and cold gowns,

and we stagger together wine-breathed into town

where our people are building

their armies again, short years after

body bags, after burnings. There is a man

I’ve come to love after thirty, and we have

our rituals of coffee, of airports, regret.

After love we smoke and sleep

with magazines, two shot glasses

and the black and white collapse of hours.

In what time do we live that it is too late

to have children? In what place

that we consider the various ways to leave?

There is no list long enough

for a selective service card shriveling

under a match, the prison that comes of it,

a flag in the wind eaten from its pole

and boys sent back in trash bags.

We’ll tell you. You were at that time

learning fractions. We’ll tell you

about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet

or lost. Let them speak for themselves.

We lie down in the fields and leave behind

the corpses of angels.

Carolyn Forché, “Selective Service” from The Country Between Us. Copyright © 1981 by Carolyn Forché. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: The Country Between Us (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1982)

Biography

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history. According to Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times Book Review, Forché’s ability to wed the “political” with the “personal” places her in the company of such poets as Pablo Neruda, Philip Levine, and Denise Levertov. An articulate . . .

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