The Poets of War

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times
June 11, 2007

Last month I invited readers to send in poems for my second Iraq Poetry Contest.

More than 500 poems poured in, and one of those that moved me most was from Frances Richey of New York City. Her son, Ben, had been deployed in Iraq. Ben always sent a gift for Mother’s Day, but this time nothing arrived and he was unreachable.

“I was terrified,” she told me, and she wrote a poem about what happened:


Last Mother’s Day, when

he was incommunicado,

nothing came.

Three days later, a message

in my box; a package,

the mail room closed.

I went out into the lobby,

banged my fist against

the desk. When they

gave it to me, I clutched it

to my chest, sobbing

like an animal.

I spoke to no one,

did not apologize ...


Susan Donnelly, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., and has written several books of poetry, wrote this poem after seeing photos from Iraq:


These figures stand the way we

humans do always:

one covering his face,

another looking to heaven.

But it is the gesture of the third,

perhaps a brother,

who has placed his open palm,

protective, firm,

on the chest of a dead man

there you can go now

that makes me, miles away

and in the wrong country,

cover my face with my hands.


In April, The Times published an article about Sam Ross, who had been welcomed as a hero in his Appalachian town when he returned blinded and disabled from the war — but whose life then spiraled downward and out of control, leaving him in prison and then a psychiatric hospital. Gordon Fain, a U.C.L.A. professor, wrote a ballad about him:


Just a coin toss,

Heads it was someone else, tails it was Ross

A volunteer

Who went to Iraq, was helping to clear

Mines to a pit

Then heard a discharge, felt the metal hit

His legs and face,

The fragments finding every open place

Of flesh and bone;

And when he woke, he lay in bed alone

Amazed to find

That he had one leg cut off and was blind.

The whole town made

Sam Ross a hero: bagpipes, a parade

A home they set

On top of a hill, but he could not forget ...

Insistent dreams

Of floating, in which his whole body seems

In peaceful flight

To burst apart in searing flames of light ...

So he began

To drink, and young men took him in a van

From his house, down

To every bar and strip club within town. ...


Then a fourth-grade student in the South Bronx, Raphael Sosa, submitted this:


I feel sad.

my friends are angry;

I’m scared.

how did my father die?

who killed him?

my father has died.

the tv tells me we won

but my father died.

my father is dead.


A lump in my throat, I checked with Raphael’s teacher. He assured me that the poem was only a product of the boy’s imagination.

These excerpts don’t do the poems justice — please read the full versions on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground .

Throughout history, the most memorable accounts of war — from Homer to Wilfred Owen — haven’t been journalistic or historical, but poetic. For whatever reason, the ugliest of human pursuits generates some of the most beautiful human handiwork.

So let’s add these poems, as one more monument to the folly of this war — and one more memorial to those who will never rejoin their families.