HONOR ROLL POEM
March 21, 2006

Wyatt Prunty, who served in the Vietnam war, was inspired to write a poem based on the NewsHour's Honor Roll of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Online NewsHour Special Reports: NewsHour Honor Roll NewsHour Poetry Series Operation Homecoming: soldiers use writing to deal with war experiences Poet Profile: Wyatt Prunty February 27, 2006 Poet Brian Turner writes about his tour in Iraq   Poetry lesson plan and resources for the classroom     The Poetry Foundation	My name is Wyatt Prunty and I served in the navy during Vietnam. I was a near-sighted gunnery officer and I don't think I hurt anyone. That was a difficult time for many; difficult for some of us because while we disagreed with the war itself, we believed we could not refuse to serve. Years later, I started the Sewanee's Writer's conference and Sewanee, Tennessee is where I now live and write. My wife and I have watched the NewsHour since its beginning, which means we've had a good long marriage. For three years we've studied the faces of soldiers from all regions and backgrounds in America. They are the ones the NewsHour has broadcast as its "honor roll." What I'm going to read is a response to those lost, yet so permanently-set people, whose lives are our mute gift. The poem is called: "The Returning Dead."
	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.

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