Looking through a scope with a poet

 Yesterday’s note on neglected writers made me think of the poet Yusef Komunyakaa.

Not that you have neglected him. I have.

His poems might not speak to you, but they speak to me, and it’s been a while since I’ve read him.

Komunyakaa, who is 75, I think, was in the Army, writing for Southern Cross, in Vietnam. His book of war poems Dien Cai Dau was published in 1988. The phrase means “crazy.”

I came to him through one of those war poems, “Starlight Scope Myopia.”

            Gray-blue shadows lift

            shadows into an oxcart.

The poet, using a night-vision scope, is watching Viet Cong load ammo.

            Are they talking about women

            or calling the Americans

 

            beaucoup dien cai dou?

The poet wants to shush the laughing man and hug the old bowlegged fellow as he watches over the sights of his rifle.

• Sources: Yusef Komunyakaa, Dien Cai Dau; Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. The Poetry Foundation has some of his poems here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=Yusef+Komunyakaa&page=3