Academy of American Poets
View Cart | Log In 
Subscribe | More Info 
Find a Poet or Poem
Advanced Search >
FURTHER READING
Poems About Funerals
In Memoriam, [To Sleep I give my powers away]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
by Dylan Thomas
Because I could not stop for Death (712)
by Emily Dickinson
By ways remote and distant waters sped (101)
by Gaius Valerius Catullus
Driven across many nations (101)
by Gaius Valerius Catullus
For the Union Dead
by Robert Lowell
Fugue of Death
by Paul Celan
In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae
O Captain! My Captain!
by Walt Whitman
Question
by May Swenson
Untitled [This is what was bequeathed us]
by Gregory Orr
What Came to Me
by Jane Kenyon
Politics and Patriotism
Howl, Parts I & II
by Allen Ginsberg
America
by James Monroe Whitfield
America
by Claude McKay
America
by Robert Creeley
American History
by Michael S. Harper
American Names
by Stephen Vincent Benét
Children of Our Era
by Wislawa Szymborska
Dear George Bush
by Kristin Prevallet
Delicate Cluster
by Walt Whitman
Election Year
by Donald Revell
Exquisite Candidate
by Denise Duhamel
Exquisite Politics
by Denise Duhamel
Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind
by Carl Sandburg
I, Too, Sing America
by Langston Hughes
Identity Crisis
by F. D. Reeve
In a Country
by Larry Levis
Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes
On the Day of Nixon's Funeral
by Ira Sadoff
Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds
by Eleanor Lerman
Patriotics
by David Baker
Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander
Thanksgiving Letter from Harry
by Carl Dennis
To Roosevelt
by Rubén Darío
Adopt a Poet | Add to Notebook | E-mail to Friend | Print
Bomb Crater Sky  
by Lam Thi My Da

They say that you, a road builder
Had such love for our country
You rushed out and waved your torch
To call the bombs down on yourself
And save the road for the troops

As my unit passed on that worn road
The bomb crater reminded us of your story
Your grave is radiant with bright-colored stones
Piled high with love for you, a young girl

As I looked in the bomb crater where you died
The rain water became a patch of sky
Our country is kind
Water from the sky washes pain away

Now you lie down deep in the earth
As the sky lay down in that earthen crater
At night your soul sheds light
Like the dazzling stars
Did your soft white skin
Become a bank of white clouds?

By day I pass under a sun-flooded sky
And it is your sky
And that anxious, wakeful disc
Is it the sun, or is it your heart
Lighting my way
As I walk down the long road?

The name of the road is your name
Your death is a young girl's patch of blue sky
My soul is lit by your life

And my friends, who never saw you
Each has a different image of your face



Share Digg StumbleUpon Facebook E-mail to Friend



From Green Rice by Lam Thi My Da. Translated by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh. Used with permission of Curbstone Press.
Larger TypeLarger Type | Home | Help | Contact Us | Privacy Policy Copyright © 1997 - 2010 by Academy of American Poets.