When I was invited to come to Arizona,
one of the things that I realized
was that I haven't read for a while.
I'll tell you why in a little while.
I haven't read in public, but you
know that we're living in very precarious times,
precarious for our consciences.
I experience a feeling that I'm sure
many of you experience, a feeling of profound unease,
and so I don't think we can have poetry readings
or discussions or talks or panels
or anything without mentioning this
and without saying something about it.
So I would like to read a couple of poems now
that arose from my experiences in wars,
and the most profound experience for me
of a conventional warfare was in Beirut in 1983 and 1984.
And I'd like to read something that I called
"Writing Kept Hidden" because it took me
20 years to write about Beirut.
20 years, I couldn't do so.
And so these are little poems.
The first one, "Writing Kept Hidden,"
is about the time I was in Beirut when the Marine
barracks were blown up by a truck bomb,
and 257 Marines were killed in that event.
After the explosion, I went over to the barracks, the ruins
of the barracks and walked around,
and the roofs were blown off.
The walls were blown away.
The places where the Marines had been sleeping--
there were drawings on the walls that the Marines
had made themselves, and they were very good drawings.
So some of them were artists.
And they had drawn themselves, and they had drawn scenes
from their lives.
And they had put some obscene language on the walls,
and I won't talk about that.
But I want to read to you a poem that came out of walking around
there, "Writing Kept Hidden."
"The black fire of ink on paper took
hold of their souls, incorporeal fire.
There was no protection this fire couldn't touch,
nor darkness nor a moment.
It lasted as long as a dream.
It was no dream.
Heteroglossia of nervous shortwave,
cloud of blown walls.
In the barracks, those who had sketched themselves
in coal and smoke became coal and smoke,
and the living remained, linking unknown things to the known--
residue, scapular, matchlight, name on a tongue.
Then for an hour, the war slept, and rain filled the cisterns
with silence.
Our windows faced east, and on August evenings,
the sky was a blue no longer spoken."