While meditating yesterday, I remembered I had written a poem about Ikeolu Terrell, whose death two or three years ago was recently made known to me.
Ikeolu, born in 1950, was in the generation that fought the Vietnam War; he did not, perhaps because he went to Yale instead. (He grew up in South-Central LA and went to Yale with a cohort of African America men; they strongly suspect they were being "studied" by the authorities there.) But he traveled to Vietnam later in his life and was, for a brief time, married to a Vietnamese woman.
The poem comes from the Albert Saijo section of the book. I'm happy to see the two of them together there, both in touch with greater worlds, and both so hurt, angered, and somehow enobled by this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment