Produced by Dennis Camire
This week’s poem is by Bruce Guernsey of Bethel. His most recent book is “From Rain: Selected Poems,” from Ecco Qua Press, 2012.
THE WALL
By Bruce Guernsey
Someone has opened a giant
map and with the tips of our
fingers, each of us suddenly
blind,
we track the black cold of this
monument for names we know
like finding a route home.
Lost here
this damp spring morning,
the cherries exploding like the Fourth of
July, we wonder how many maps of Viet
Nam sold those years,
so many strange sounding places.
One of us holds a magnifying
glass to McCarroll, McMorris,
McNabb, small print in the
polished stone,
the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga,
Illinois, might have done, late at night
searching that faraway land on his kitchen table,
hearing again the morning
paper thump against the front
door, that boy on his bike in
the dark
grown and gone — what was his
name, that kid from down the
block? —
Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi.
Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu
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