WEBVTT

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I'm going to read
one more poem which

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I've written about the Vietnam
War, which I haven't finished,

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and some of the lines
are a little ragged.

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But it's a poem called
"Driving through Minnesota

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During the Hanoi Bombings," that
is, the first Hanoi bombings.

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We'll have some others later.

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And it's a sort of
merging of the poems I

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did about the
Minnesota countryside

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with this sort of a thing.

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Well, as I say, there's
something distant

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about the war.

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There's something invisible.

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Somehow it's an act of
self-destruction and not God,

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like the automobile accident.

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"It is late June.

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Minnesota's blues are just
starting to turn green.

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The white turkey farms have
been moved to new ground

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for the second time.

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I think of the tiny particles of
pain that are almost immortal,

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the man with the shoulders
torn, shot from helicopters,

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or the boy tortured
with a telephone

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generator for half an hour.

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'I felt sorry for him,
finally' the sergeant said,

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'and blew his head
off with a shotgun.'

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These instants hover in the
air, glowing, like a planet

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made of mica.

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Our own joy will end up in
Asia, and in your coffee cup

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you will see Black Starfighters.

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These things are happening
inside our own heads.

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We are the ones we
intended to bomb!

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And therefore we will
have to go far away

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to atone for the suffering
of the stringy-chested

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and the small rice-fed
ones, quivering

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in the helicopter like wild
animals, shot in the chest,

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taken back to be questioned."

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