This poem is the first that ever that I wrote. It opens my masters thesis. I wrote it in 1996. It comes from an intense place and relates an intense experience.
In Ponchos
They had been kill/died
The day/the night before.
Now they lie in the distance,
Fifteen/twenty, lined
Side by side on a narrow
Rice paddy road
Wrapped in ponchos
To be flown away.
“But we sleep wrapped in ponchos.
They’re just asleep!
It’s ten o’clock in the morning.
The sun’s hot.
It’s too hot &
Too late to sleep!
I’ll run to them &
Shake them & yell
Roll Out! Get Up!”
But they’re
Dead.
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1 comment:
riveting...perhaps even more so than the first time I read this in yor thesis, since today I read it on Good Friday. And I wonder/project what Mary and the others gathered at the foot of the cross thought when Christ' lifeless body was brought down. Death often brings to us the living an incredulity.
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