At the National D-Day Memorial

Abstract

At the National D-Day Memorial Graham Hillard (bio) —Bedford, Virginia Like a wound, or a medal pressed into a widow’s hands,it lies upon the landscape, one hundred acres called to attention, gathered into such stillnessthat even the birds seem wary of it, flitting away before I can name them. The names one finds hereare artifacts, antique as ration coins: Vester, Eldridge, boys innocent in the telling they have left usalong with this bronze necrology, careful arch on which our dead are graven. Nearly everyonewho knew them is gone. Soon the names will be mere letters, codes for which the cipher has been lost,knowable only by this context: sculpture park, gardened plaza where even now Eisenhower gazestoward Normandy, his face as white as England’s chalk horses. I don’t know if I can claim thissuffering, this desperate victory. Beneath the Overlord Arch, the Ad commemorandum has begun to fade. Soldierssprint, frozen, through early tide, their helmets dully gleaming. Above a stairway, men of the Second Ranger Battalion scalePointe du Hoc without ceasing. They will not meet my eye. [End Page 652] Graham Hillard Graham Hillard professes English at Trevecca Nazarene University and is the editor of the Cumberland River Review. With poetry in The Believer, Image, Notre Dame Review, and numerous other journals, he has also written for the Oxford American, the Weekly Standard, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Copyright © 2015 Graham Hillard