William Heyen’s book-length poem Ribbons: The Gulf War (1991) documents Operation Desert Storm and its aftermath from the relative tranquility of Brockport, New York, where Heyen (b. 1940) was then an English professor. Like most Americans, he experienced the war mainly from his “television chair”; and while he was against the war from the start, writing “a newspaper column . . . a complex of againsts” to oppose it, there is nothing strident or rallying in his poems (as there is, for a counterexample, in June Jordan’s “The Bombing of Baghdad,” on page 677). Indeed Heyen is often concerned about the limits of poetry in the face of war and his own complicity in it, as a taxpayer and sometimes too eager watcher of CNN, “waiting for [his] money’s worth.”
“The Truth”—the poem’s thirty-eighth section, of forty-one—is a mild exception. Frustrated by the yellow ribbons that had begun to appear in Brockport as elsewhere across the country, Heyen climbed his roof and tied “a large black configuration of bow & ribbons” to his TV antenna. It was an enigmatic protest to be sure, and one that he never fully owned—but still an act of public dissent, at a time and in a place where there were few.
Heyen retired from teaching in 2000 but continues to live in Brockport. Since then, he has edited September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (2002) and has written several books of poetry including Shoah Train (2003), A Poetics of Hiroshima (2008), and most recently Crazy Horse & the Custers (2015).
Across Brockport Village, a blight of orange & yellow ribbons
meant to remember our half-million participants
in “Operation Desert Storm,” those who put their lives on line
to protect our country, as our president says.
Darkening ribbons encircle trees, telephone poles,
mailboxes, porch rails—so I was understandably half bored
& half nuts with war & ugliness, so climbed to my roof
& tied a large black configuration of bow & ribbons
to my aerial. Up there, I saw how it divides the winter sky
with its alphabet of one emotional letter, a vowel. . . .
At first, no one noticed, but then a car turned around.
Later, a police cruiser slowed down, & then another.
A reporter stopped for that infamous photo that appeared in Time
& the first of a hundred interviews I declined,
& neighbors gathered. My phone kept ringing off the wall,
people yelling “bastard,” & “traitor,” & “get it the hell down,
or else.” . . . Eventually, my best friend came to my door
& asked me why. I explained, “I can’t explain.” Others followed,
& insisted. “No comment,” I said. “I don’t want trouble,”
I said. “Read Hawthorne’s ‘The Minister’s Black Veil.’”
I still like the way the black bow & ribbons flutter,
stark but suggestive of comic dark, serious, direct,
my own American allegiance & patriotic light.
Parson Hooper had his reasons, & half understood them,
but when he slept or spoke, his breath trembled the veil,
& even holy scripture seemed filtered by the terrible
transformation of black crepe into symbol. In the end,
not even his creator could commend the visionary parson
who espied the truth that separates & condemns.
Above my village, this beauty of black bow & ribbons.