A little bit of literature

“Roll Call

Through rifle sights

We must’ve looked like crows

perched on a fire-eaten branch,

lined up for reveille, ready

to roll-call each M-16

propped upright

between a pair of jungle boots,

a helmet on its barrel

as if it were a man.

The perfect row aligned

with the chaplain’s cross

while a metallic-gray squadron

of sea gulls circled. Only

a few lovers have blurred

the edges of this picture.

Sometimes I can hear them

marching through the house,

closing the distance. All

the lonely beds take me back

to where we saluted those

five pairs of boots

as the sun rose against our faces.”

Vocabulary build-up

The intransitive verb perch means “to stand, sit, or rest on an elevated place or position; to alight or rest on a perch; roost.” The noun perch means “A rod or branch serving as a roost for a bird.”

The noun reveille means “the sounding of a bugle early in the morning to awaken and summon people in a camp or garrison.”

Comments

Yusef Komunyakaa, born James William Brown on April 29, 1941, is an American poet and professor at New York University, as well as a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The son of a carpenter, Komunyakaa has said that he was first alerted to the power of language through his grandparents, who were church people: “the sound of the Old Testament informed the cadences of their speech,” Komunyakaa once stated. “It was my first introduction to poetry.” Komunyakaa went on to serve in the Vietnam War as a correspondent; he was managing editor of the Southern Cross during the war, for which he received a Bronze Star, and has since used these experiences as the source of his war poetry in his poetry collections Toys in a Field (1986) and Dien Cai Dau (1988), the title of which derives from a derogatory term in Vietnamese for American soldiers. Komunyakaa has said that following his return to the United States, he found the American people’s rejection of Vietnam veterans to be every bit as painful as the racism he had experienced while growing up in the American South before the Civil Rights Movement. Komunyakaa later earned a BA from the University of Colorado Springs on the GI Bill, an MA from Colorado State University, and an MFA from the University of California-Irvine. In his poetry, he weaves together personal narrative, jazz rhythms, and vernacular language to create complex images of life in peace and in war. In the New York Times, Bruce Weber described Komunyakaa as “Wordsworthian,” adding that the poet has a “worldly, philosophic mind… His poems, many of which are built on fiercely autobiographical details—about his stint in Vietnam, about his childhood—deal with the stains that experience leaves on a life, and they are often achingly suggestive without resolution.”