Them

photograph by Robert Doisneau

Oh, for war's sweet end,
to be grounded in home,
freed from the smells
of gore—I mean glory.
We kiss and
we kiss
and would do it again
do it all over again,
not me, not us, but them
they'll do it again 
for there's always a them—
a new wave of them
who yearn for the glory
of the lock and load,
for the trill of the bugle
and the fame of a kiss.
Again.

This image comes from Magpie Tales, the blog dedicated to honing the pens of poets and writers.

After The Knifing

he avoided her father.  
But when the wound started to heal,
he knew he’d be left with a scar.
He’d never been cut,
and he wondered why
his uncle, a veteran of undeclared war,
hadn’t warned him about the aftermath of that.
The crushing humiliation of having one’s mortality
laid open for all to see.


It's Friday. It's the mean season (the writing season), and time for a Flash 55. If you have written a short story in a sparse 55 words, post it and let the world know. Or at least let the G-Man know.

Hello fifty-fivers!! TGIF!

After I posted this, I realized I was a day late, lost in time . . . but not a word shy. So, TGIS!

SOLDIER

They come home to cameras and flags,
balloons and poster boards.
They come home to old soldiers
in receiving lines with flags raised—
Hip Hip Hooray
old soldiers who form a gauntlet civilians hesitate to walk.
Like the mounds of dirt we skirt in a cemetery
(even after the soil settles),
we are not worthy to walk their gauntlet.
Don’t shake my hand; I only work here.
This receiving line is not for me.

And I wonder . . .
Are these new soldiers in it for the money?
Don’t hate me, I merely ask.
Serving merely for pay, says Webster,
is the definition of mercenary.
With the flag sewn backwards on their sleeves,
do they know what it means
to be in it for the money?

Sometimes they fly in alone to a girlfriend or a parent
and I wonder how they managed it.
There’s room for honest emotion
without the media attention and the old vets
who only want them to have what they didn’t have.

A mother and father wait outside the security checkpoint
with eyes fixed on the horizon of the terminal
for a glimpse of their boy.
They shyly hold two small flags,
like the ones sold on the 4th of July
that you’re supposed to—I guess—stick in the flowerbed
like an ornamental praying mantis
to show your support.
Thrust upon them like the recruiter’s handshake,
they aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do with them.

Their boy walks down the exit lane to meet them.
“Put those away,” he says. "I need a cigarette.”

Something Nobody Will Want To Read

You have only to look around you and you’ll see
blood being spilled, in the most playful way,
just as if it were champagne.
-Dostoyevsky 1864

We can’t afford to stay warm.
Christmas lights strung around the porch
and across the buffet and above the cupboard
lift the spirit but don’t give off warmth.
The register beside my chair with a wee amount of heat
is all I have
and a feeling like broken glass.

I broke the votive candleholder
into a million pieces
Blood red shards of glass
scatter across the floor
and fly under the piano.
Now they’re embedded in the tongue and grove
of a hand-laid floor
(my father on his knees
when he was young).
A feeling like that.

We’re weighed down in a wasteland of war—
scavenger of commodity.
Libraries languish and roads crumble,
and children go without textbooks
so we can spill blood like champagne
and march in step.
Flags wave grandly from gated communities
and likewise weakly from a doorjamb
in front of the hovel without heat
for heroes in uniforms
with flags sewn on backwards.
A feeling like that.

The red ones are theirs and the green ones are ours

I have a friend whose father was an explosive specialist in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. He was an engineer and walked point. He broke his tailbone jumping into a ditch. He was testing the terrain.

He is still in therapy for Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. He couldn’t hold a job because he was too explosive. If anyone touched him he would go crazy, fighting all the time, still fighting.

My friend says his father hates the 4th of July. The fireworks become tracers. “The red ones are theirs,” he told him. “And the green ones are ours.” It’s scary having a father like that.

He told me a story. He and his brother were spending the weekend at a cottage in the woods with their father when he found him inside, staring at a wall. He asked him what was wrong and his father said he was trying to remember the name of the corpsman who patched him up. He could see his face but couldn’t remember his name. He tried all weekend to remember that name. He wasn’t really at the cottage in the woods that weekend. He was sorting the red ones from the greens ones. He was looking for a friend.

He wouldn’t let his sons go in the service. He told them they could do anything but that.

I would pack my son off to Canada or further before I would let him be taken or coerced or bribed, whatever you want to call it when they dangle education, bonues and promises of honor and esteem in front of wondering eyes. I would pack him some cookies and peaches, blankets and sheets, candles, soap and towels. I would wish him music and books and easy nights and happy days. Can you pack a box of happiness? What would it cost to mail a box of happiness, return receipt requested?

Don't Make Me Push You

The choppers circled in from the east to carry them out, stirring up clouds of red dust with a velocity that had all the power of the American war machine behind it. They had been ordered to pack a four-day supply of everything, so it took effort to climb aboard, but it would take the balance of a ballerina to jump back out. The pilots rarely put the skids down. It was too risky. They would hover over the elephant grass as low as they dared, but there would still be a drop of several feet, and anything could be waiting for those whose job it was to jump.

Will found a spot by the open door and sat on his helmet in case Charlie-on-the-ground tried to shoot his balls off. Nobody talked. They were being flown into “Indian country,” the deep bush. Even so, the chopper ride was a reprieve, and the cooler air made it possible to imagine oneself in a different hemisphere. But all too soon they were brought back to the reality of their descent. They flew in low over a field of opium poppies undulating like wheat in the sun. They checked their weapons and the weight on their backs. There were hand signals and radio talk, and the poppies gave way to elephant grass and the pilot was maneuvering the craft as low as he could and it was time to jump and the copilot was signaling: Don’t make me push you.