War Poetry

Nicholas D. Kristof’s column in the New York Times on Monday really touched me and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Last month, he invited his readers to send poems for his second Iraq Poetry Contest and published some of the most moving two days ago. One, by a fourth grade student in the South Bronx, Raphael Sosa, is chilling:

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.