I'm going to read one more poem which
I've written about the Vietnam War, which I haven't finished,
and some of the lines are a little ragged.
But it's a poem called "Driving through Minnesota
During the Hanoi Bombings," that is, the first Hanoi bombings.
We'll have some others later.
And it's a sort of merging of the poems I
did about the Minnesota countryside
with this sort of a thing.
Well, as I say, there's something distant
about the war.
There's something invisible.
Somehow it's an act of self-destruction and not God,
like the automobile accident.
"It is late June.
Minnesota's blues are just starting to turn green.
The white turkey farms have been moved to new ground
for the second time.
I think of the tiny particles of pain that are almost immortal,
the man with the shoulders torn, shot from helicopters,
or the boy tortured with a telephone
generator for half an hour.
'I felt sorry for him, finally' the sergeant said,
'and blew his head off with a shotgun.'
These instants hover in the air, glowing, like a planet
made of mica.
Our own joy will end up in Asia, and in your coffee cup
you will see Black Starfighters.
These things are happening inside our own heads.
We are the ones we intended to bomb!
And therefore we will have to go far away
to atone for the suffering of the stringy-chested
and the small rice-fed ones, quivering
in the helicopter like wild animals, shot in the chest,
taken back to be questioned."