Classic and Contemporary Poetry
SURVIVORS, by KAREN SWENSON Poet's Biography First Line: They came up to her, strangers in the street Last Line: Mirrors, for bargirls who ask no questions. Subject(s): Cambodia; Death; Vietnam; Dead, The | ||||||||
I. They came up to her, strangers in the street, clutched her, dug fingernails into her arm and told her blond hair, her foreign blue eyes, how their grandfather was clubbed to death, their child died of malnutrition, they couldn't find their mother. Now, she says, ten years later, they are better. II. Walled up in the band's riffs of Western rock, beneath the turning mirror ball that fragments us into mosaics of faces, we shout out questions as he watches Vietnamese bargirls churn their hips. He yells his wife, his three daughters tortured, killed. He was in France. We eat our fish, our chicken, listening to his family's massacre. His fevered eyes shine black as lacquerware. We holler our regrets, our horror. He shrugs and leaves us for deafness in the rock band's restive din, for blindness in the glitter of revolving mirrors, for bargirls who ask no questions. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A FRIEND KILLED IN THE WAR by ANTHONY HECHT FOR JAMES MERRILL: AN ADIEU by ANTHONY HECHT TARANTULA: OR THE DANCE OF DEATH by ANTHONY HECHT CHAMPS D?ÇÖHONNEUR by ERNEST HEMINGWAY NOTE TO REALITY by TONY HOAGLAND |
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