Poet's Choice

Who better than Simic to make our own wartime losses real? This poem is called "Driving Home," and it runs through me like a hard hammered nail:

Minister of our coming doom, preaching

On the car radio, how right

Your Hell and damnation sound to me

As I travel these small, bleak roads

Thinking of the mailman's son

The Army sent back in a sealed coffin.

His house is around the next turn.

A forlorn mutt sits in the yard

Waiting for someone to come home.

I can see the TV is on in the living room,

Canned laughter in the empty house

Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

That last image of beer cans tied to a hearse as if for a wedding is an apt simile for the horror of overhearing sitcom laughter in the fallen soldier's home. The particular tragedy evokes at the level of a whisper the raging grief that now afflicts the thousands who mourn fallen loved ones.

(Charles Simic's "Prodigy" is from "Selected Early Poems," George Braziller, 2000. "St. Thomas Aquinas" is from "The Book of Gods and Devils," Harcourt Brace, 1990. "Driving Home" is printed here with the poet's permission. Copyright Charles Simic.)

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."