A bomb photographed me on the stone,
on a white wall, a burned outline where
the bomb rays found me out in the open
and ended me, person and shadow, never to cast
a shadow again, but be here so light
the sun doesn’t know. People on Main Street
used to stand in their certain chosen places —
I walk around them. It wouldn’t be right
if I stood there. But all of their shadows are mine now —
I am so white on the stone.
April is National Poetry Month and every day the peaceCENTER will be posting a poem about walls, fences, edges, borders. . . you get the idea. Walls that separate us, protect us, define us, challenge us . . . we collected these poems for our Walls Symposium in 2009.
William Stafford (1914-1993) was an American poet and pacifist. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.
