WHAT WE OWE
For all those who harmed
my father and my father’s father
For all those my father
and my father’s father brought to harm
How do we now walk arm in arm
Shall we start by tallying
what we owe and where the payment ends
An apology for sure
A compensation maybe
Never a revenge
CHECKPOINT
The Marine Sergeant said
We put up our hands for them to stop
If they kept going we just lit them up
Our patrol killed thirty or forty civilians
in one forty eight hour period
Later I learned that a hand in the air like that
is just a sign for hello in Iraq
I never want to go back
BODY COUNT
The trouble is
you can only count the bodies that count
Afghani and Iraqi soldiers and citizens
have already paid ten times 911
but it doesn’t seem to help
If it’s only American lives that count
then it’s only American deaths that count
So if one dead hero cancels one dead victim
let’s give some thanks this Thanksgiving
we’re more than half way there
IRAQ AND BACK
Your innocent children they took away
returning now as corpses or as killers
and you now learning how little
the difference between the two
BLOOD
The drums of war are beating again
and all the brave young boys
are leaving their mothers
to go off and be men
And they all will be changed
for the better or worse
and many a blessing
lies under a curse
And if they come back at all
when they come back from war
they’ll have friends oh my friends
like they’ve not had before
Yes the friends they make here
midst the death and the fear
are friends that grow dear
and yet dearer each year
For a new family is formed
in the sand and the mud
where each man learns
blood is thicker
than blood
GRAVE
From every body dropped
into the not quite solid earth
ripples of might have been
NEVER MORE BEAUTIFUL
(for Lee Cherry)
Visited last year and again last month
with old friend Lee in Tennessee
Ten years and more of cancer
and that Chattannooga choo choo
may be pulling out soon
The skin has become
more and more transparent
the soul more and more shining through
I expect by the next time we drop in
a floating glimpse of Alice’s cat
with a Mona Lisa grin
THE MOST LOVELY HELEN
Poets are not saints
but by the grace of God and nature
and the law of magnets that attract them
If you believe in heaven she will go
If you believe that we come back
next time she may be the poet
blessed with one like her
Beloved wife of master poet Herman Nelson who in his words “took one last gulp of time and sank into eternity” in 2003
SONG OF MY FATHER’S SONG
I am the end of a long line
and the music plays in my head
feeling the need to sing the songs
of the silent living and the silent dead
To somehow feel and heal each one
right down to my grandfather’s son
To sing the songs of a slow gray man
who runs and runs till out of breath
chased yet by the swift dark wolves
of a long ago young mother’s death
With all the tender sores and songs
and all the stories he needed to tell
cauterized by a hard world’s fires
and the scabs on a private hell
And the part of him that I can’t touch
is the part of me that I can’t touch
the part of me I need so much
God help me to reach that note
God help me to clear my throat
THANKSGIVING
The natives did share their food with the
first settlers
But
It is well documented
though not well known
that the first official Thanksgiving
(proclaimed by the governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637)
was in celebration of a massacre of 700 Pequot
men, women, and children gathered together
for their own dance of thanks
Ordered out of their home they were shot as
they came forth; those who stayed inside
were burned alive
We have a long history of freedom
We have freed the Americans from America
We are now freeing the Iraquis from Iraq
There will feasting when the boys come back