When Kinnell sets out to make a poem he doesn’t aim for it to be political, but the associations he perceives are political. In the poem Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond, the narrator, a Vietnamese villager, overhears “America singing,” the melody existence the crunching of rifles varied with a bomber plane’s buzz. Thus, it gaps war and peace by telling a bomber in contradiction of the backdrop of a peaceful setting.