With President Biden in Poland today, yesterday in Ukraine, I went to the vault for this poem, which feels surprisingly current even though I wrote it in 1983.
Above the flares of border guards
a camouflage balloon of stitched raincoats
drifted over the ripped Curtain into Austria.
The man in the basket was a Czech hero,
his racing bike broken down and neatly packed.
The same night two sentries scaled a ten-foot fence in East Berlin;
they had waited a year for the army to pair them.
Automatic guns and all, the men raised beers in a U.S. Zone bar.
AP, CBS, BBC, and NPR produce reports like instant coffee.
The latest bit is from Poland, where "labor leader Lech Walesa"
told sniffing hounds of his surprise while driving with friends
to pick mushrooms in the Gdansk forest when radio news
announced he had won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
If the irreducible act, immediately broadcast, registers like a tuned string,
I take it for truth, weighing it against news I’ve proofed
in a mix of first-hand views and faith.