Kevin Powers’ “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting”

Kevin Powers’ “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” reminds me of Lt. Jimmy Cross in the first chapter from Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”. He spends much of his time in Vietnam thinking Martha, the girl he loved back home. As in the book, this poem puts you in the man's shoes, lying in a fox hole amidst a monsoon of gunfire. While there is truly no way a person can know what an individual experienced while fighting in a war, the poet does his job of conveying the feeling, making it easily relatable to an ordinary person.



In the first stanza of Powers' poem he describes a young man confessing his love for a woman, "I tell her I love her like not killing/or ten minutes of sleep/beneath the low rooftop wall" (lines 1-3). When you are facing death, you can relate deeper emotions to the mundane acts of human life. You never know how much you love not killing, or what a pleasure a quick nap can bring, until you may never have those choices again. He is obviously trying to express how deeply he loves this woman, and in that moment he sees how precious things he took for granted in the past truly are.



A remark made to the man while in his fox hole from one Pvt. Bartle runs, "war is just us/making little pieces of metal/pass through each other" (Powers lines 10-12). What a remarkably philosophical quote this is, completely removed from the politics and prejudices of war, looking at their predicament with new eyes. War has, over the ages, been boiled down to simple statements by poets and writers of the time, and this is a powerful interpretation of modern warfare. While in the past, before the time of firearms and ICBM's, war was a much more personal matter. In order to take one’s life you had to be hand to hand, face to face with your opponent. You had to look into a man's eyes as you stripped the life away from him. Today war is a machine run by heavy weaponry devised to obliterate the opponent while sending the least number of ground troops in as possible. It is just humans sending metal pieces through other humans: hot metal that sears the flesh and makes the blood boil before lying cold for eternity.



Going back to the Greek tragedies of old, poets and writers tell tales of love and war, they delve into the depths of human intrigue. Often the two subjects are intertwined, as in the Fall of Troy: A whole war began because of Paris' love for Helen. The reason human life is so interesting is because of our capacity to feel, to love, to suffer. If we did not get our hearts broken when our love fails us, would there be a point to love?

Works Cited

O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1990. Print

Powers, Kevin. “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.” Poetry Foundation. February 2009. 15 June 2010. Web. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182821