Weekly Poem: 'The Returning Dead'

For Memorial Day, we have a poem that aired on the NewsHour four years ago. "Wyatt Prunty":http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5521 wrote the "The Returning Dead" as a response to the NewsHour's "Honor Roll":http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/search_results_date.html?q=honor%20roll, those faces of soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. "What I'm going to read," Prunty says, "is a response to those lost, yet so permanently-set people, whose lives are our mute gift." 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.