Other Boys
(Watching The Thin Red Line with Piotr
and Adam on Podleśna Street, Gdańsk)
The boys from one country watch boys
from another country die. Through
the miracle of television, all
stories are possible. The boys crawl through
the green grass, tops blown off, the deaths both quick
and with long speeches. Take the high hill,
screams Nick Nolte as one boy
nears the screen, then presses his fingertips,
the sun going down at just the wrong time
for him to catch the small, abrupt movement
of a figure from the left, a murky
shadow, the angel of his death, or just
his mother coming with tea, that planet
he knows is out there—where the grass is cut down
for soccer.
Daniel Bourne’s books include The Household Gods (Cleveland State) and Where No One Spoke the Language (Custom Words). Besides Innisfree Poetry Journal, his poems have also been in such journals as Ploughshares, Field, American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Guernica, Salmagundi, Pleiades, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The Yale Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He was born near Wynoose, Illinois, to a farming family. Until he retired in May 2020, he taught in the English Department and in the Environmental Studies program at the College of Wooster. He is also the founding editor of Artful Dodge. Since 1980 he has also lived in Poland, including 1985-87 on a Fulbright for the translation of younger Polish poets and in 2018 and 2019 for more translation work on an anthology of Polish poets of the Baltic Coast. In the U.S. the translations have appeared widely, including in Field, Colorado Review, Partisan Review, Plume, Boulevard, and Salmagundi.