War and other things

American poet Wyatt Prunty gave a stunning reading of his poem The Returning Dead the other night on the Lehrer News Hour.
I was quite bowled over. Each night they superimpose pictures of the dead. Prunty's poem was a sort of 'right of reply'. Truly powerful stuff. See it if you can (here)

He reads almost as badly as Eliot or Frost...but it has a power nevertheless.
The subsequent honour roll-pictures of the recetly dead- showed once again what the 1st World War Poets discovered. War is a thing that old men do to their sons!!

The Returning Dead 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. The world can rearrange Itself repeatedly, but these remain The same, silent in everything they lack; That's what they've come to, in places with names Like Afghanistan, Iraq, And this is the way it happens: the words Are old - mother, father, home - and will catch Surrounding currents in the slow absurd Descending will of any river etched Out of a landscape history refines To myth. The TV blanks between Segments, but every static face defines Itself, holds stubbornly its private scene… Fixed, publicly, as we are led Back to that little negative whose lack Is each of us, staring the staring dead, Leaning, sometimes like grief itself; then straightening back.