Bruce Dawe Homecoming Analysis

Homecoming by Bruce Dawe

All day, day after day, they’re bringing them home, they’re picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them home, they’re bringing them in, piled on the hulls of Grants, in trucks, in convoys, they’re zipping them up in green plastic bags, they’re tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness they’re giving them names, they’re rolling them out of the deep-freeze lockers – on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut the noble jets are whining like hounds, they are bringing them home
– curly- heads, kinky hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms
– they’re high, now high and higher, over the land, the steaming chow mein, their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific with sorrowful quick fingers, heading