Poem of the Week: Yusef Komunyakaa

            

Thanks
 

Thanks for the tree

between me & a sniper's bullet.

I don't know what made the grass

sway seconds before the Viet Cong

raised his soundless rifle.

Some voice always followed,

telling me which foot

to put down first.

Thanks for deflecting the ricochet

against that anarchy of dusk.

I was back in San Francisco

wrapped up in a woman's wild colors,

causing some dark bird's love call

to be shattered by daylight

when my hands reached up

& pulled a branch away

from my face. Thanks

for the vague white flower

that pointed to the gleaming metal

reflecting how it is to be broken

like mist over the grass,

as we played some deadly

game for blind gods.

What made me spot the monarch

writhing on a single thread

tied to a farmer's gate,

holding the day together

like an unfingered guitar string,

is beyond me. Maybe the hills

grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.

Again, thanks for the dud

hand grenade tossed at my feet

outside Chu Lai. I'm still

falling through its silence.

I don't know why the intrepid

sun touched the bayonet,

but I know that something

stood among those lost trees

& moved only when I moved. 

-Yusef Komunyakaa 

From Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan University Press, 1988). 

Used by permission.     

Yusef Komunyakaa's seventeen books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, Warhorses, and most recently The Chameleon Couch and Testimony. His many honors include the William Faulkner Prize (Universite Rennes, France), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art, and libretti have been performed internationally and include Saturnalia, Testimony, and  Gilgamesh: A Verse Play. Komunyakaa's prose is collected in Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries (University of Michigan Press, 2000). He also co-edited The Jazz Poetry Anthology (with J. A. Sascha Feinstein, 1991), co-translated The Insomnia of Fire by Nguyen Quang Thieu (with Martha Collins, 1995), and served as guest editor for The Best of American Poetry 2003. He teaches at New York University.