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Vietnam Epic Treatment

By Donald Revell b. 1954 Donald Revell

It doesn’t matter

A damn what’s playing—

In the dead of winter

You go, days of 1978—

79, and we went

Because the soldiers were beautiful

And doomed as Asian jungles

Kept afire Christ-like

In the hopeless war

I did not go to in the end

Because it ended.

The 20^th century?

It was a war

Between peasants on the one side,

Hallucinations on the other.

A peasant is a fire that burns

But is not consumed.

His movie never ends.

It will be beautiful

Every winter of our lives, my love,

As Christ crushes fire into his wounds

And the wounds are a jungle.

Equally, no matter when their movies end,

Hallucinations destroy the destroyers.

That’s all.

There has never been a President of the United States.

And the 21^st century?

Hallucination vs. hallucination

In cold battle, in dubious battle,

No battle at all because the peasants

Have gone away far

Into the lost traveler’s dream,

Into a passage from Homer,

A woodcutter’s hillside

Peacetime superstition movie.

On a cold night, Hector.

On a cold night, Achilles.

Around the savage and the maniac

The woodcutter draws a ring of fire.

It burns all winter long.

He never tires of it

And for good reason:

Every face of the flames is doomed and beautiful;

Every spark that shoots out into the freezing air

Is God’s truth

Given us all over again

In the bitter weather of men’s

Hallucinations. There has never been

A President of the United States.

There has never been a just war.

There has never been any life

Beyond this circle of firelight

Until now if now is no dream but an Asia.

Donald Revell, “Vietnam Epic Treatment” in There Are Three © 1992 by Donald Revell and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Source: There Are Three (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)

Biography

Born in the Bronx, Donald Revell received his PhD at SUNY Buffalo and is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, translations, and essays. Steeped in the work of Henry David Thoreau and William Carlos Williams, Revell’s poetry is “seriously Christian but not doctrinaire, mystical without setting intellect aside, angry over political matters without ever growing stale or shrill, and more often joyful than any other . . .

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