Up the Mekong they come, still
fifty and sixty years on
by boat and oar, boat and motor, 
by canoe and oar, by basket boat, 
by lashed-bamboo rafts they pole like pirogues.
Some come from the Midwest 
hard by the Missouri, or Mississippi, 
some come from the East by the Ohio, or Allegheny.
Those from the Mississippi Delta
or Louisiana bayou
do best. They all come 
to claim and recover the remains 
of fathers, husbands, uncles, and brothers—
no one comes for sons anymore—
who had been soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, 
long officially Missing in Action.
They come to change the records 
to Killed in Action.    

One old poet wrote it is sweet and right
to die for one’s country.  
To that emperor-pleasing sentiment
these people would say no, 
but it is right to journey here, to go 
into this hissing jungle, into it for this. 
An older poet, beginning his story
with the Greek hero Achilles raging 
on an Aegean beach over a slight
over a girl, and refusing to fight
later tells of the aged King of Troy
risking death to enter Achilles’s camp 
to beg for the body of his dead son Hector.  
In all its tellings through all the centuries 
Priam, King of Troy, in the end is dead 
and Achilles too.

Old Priam, old
women at Golgotha, 
and you old men and women 
poling upriver into Indochina, 
whyever do you bother?