Parting Shots

image borrowed from bing

PARTING SHOTS

1

Long, confident sentences
of the early visitors,

so unlike ours,
so much like one another,

remark
on the sculpted “grandeur”

of the walls,
and then, with one light touch,

on the bracing sense
of insignificance

that they impart.

2

Behind the only wall in sight,
the defamiliarized wall,

a sniper
tells a camera crew

his work is “invigorating”
because it’s “personal.”


Rae Armantrout

Posted over on Poems & Poetics