Eliza Griswold, “Wideawake Field”

I’ve never been where we are,
although the glass studded
with soldier’s rusted buttons
says we aren’t the first.
The airstrip’s islands of cracked macadam
suggest an ancient volcano.
We are the volcano.

We, the notes sung
by a creator, who, if not singular,
is creation—
not an idea, a force.
Let us tumble.
Let us laugh at our grip.
If these are last days,
let them not catch us sleeping
but awake in this field, and ready.

The title poem from Griswold’s debut collection, Wideawake Field. She is also a Nieman Fellow journalist who’s written feature stories on, among other subjects, the frontlines of Iraq, the radical Islamist insurgency in Bangladesh, cannibalism among Congolese rebels, and what U.S. military are doing in Afghan prisons, and her first book-length work of nonfiction, The Tenth Parallel, will be published later this year. (I first mentioned these articles after attending Griswold’s book party for GalleyCat.)

8 June 2007 | poetry |