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Waiting for a Number

1951 –

words appeared as the soft purring of a cat, crow screeching,

end of a hymn, cicadas in trees—spilling in the white

noise of my head—Da Nang Mekong Saigon Nam.

I walked suburban streets to school, hi-fi blasting Somebody To Love,

coach meting out orders, my playbook of fakes and jives,

my head swelling in the helmet. Over sweet cocktails with my beloved

under the yellowing gingkoes of 64th off Lex, for a moment I felt

grown up and then the air in my head was orange chemical Dow

and DuPont, the juke box blasting Light My Fire—and where were we?

staring at the image: pistol to the head, a boy I once knew

on the white-lined field was bagged

and flown back in the dioxin haze of morning.

In the mangrove of my head chopping sounds

under the covers, rice patties—floating mirrors with unidentified

objects. There were Catholics in Saigon and Catholics on my street,

what about Laos? what about Cambodia?

American questions spilling in sunlight on white

shutters, and I’m home on plush carpet waiting for a number.

Peter Balakian is the author of No Sign (University of Chicago Press 2022) and Ozone Journal (University of Chicago Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Themes

About this Poem

“Along with the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War was the defining historic event of my coming of age. My friends and I lived in its daily social and political fall-out; We protested it, we studied it, and like many Americans we knew the war was wrong. We imagined our fate if drafted. When President Nixon instituted the draft lottery in 1970, we waited in some complex gray zone of fear and anxiety to see if our number might lead us to combat. This poem, which will be in my forthcoming book, No Sign, deals with that moment.”
—Peter Balakian

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More by this poet

Day of the Dead

I stared at mangoes piled outside
restaurants as the morning pho

steamed into the street—
the air like a wet towel

and a taxi driver said to me, as I sat in the back seat,
“We do ancestor worship here more than Buddhism.”

Peter Balakian

2025

Little Richard

On a walk past bulldozers and trucks
pouring tarmac for the NJ Eisenhower highway
my grandmother said to me as we turned

into a market with olive barrels, hanging
meat, piles of sumac and coriander—
“he shakes away my blues.” It was 1959,

Peter Balakian

2022

Ode to the Duduk

It’s not the wind I hear driving south
 
through the Catskills—it’s just bad news from the radio
 
and then a hailstorm morphs into sunlight
 
—look up and there’s—
an archipelago of starlings trailing some clouds—
 
But how does the wind come through you
primordial hollow—unflattened double reed—
 
so even now when bad news comes with the evening report—
I can press a button on the dashboard and hear your breath implode
 
the way wind blows through the slit windows of a church in Dilijan,
 
then a spac

Peter Balakian

2018

Poems

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Waiting for a Number

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