May 31, 2011 Last night in commemoration of Memorial Day, PBS closed The News Hour with a feature on Sewanee poet Wyatt Prunty, whose poem “The Returning Dead” was inspired by the program’s nightly “honor roll” of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (The program first aired in 2006.) Prunty is no stranger to combat—he served in Vietnam—though he claims no heroics: “I was a nearsighted gunnery officer, and I don’t think I hurt anyone,” he explains in an introduction to his reading of the poem. It begins this way:
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.
Read the full poem—and watch Prunty read it himself—here. To read Chapter 16‘s interview with Prunty, click here.
Tagged: Poetry
