TAKEN FROM THE ILIAD
I was stolen away; you took me, you and all your
wastrel guardians of this and that : tower men and
gunnery captains, bombardiers and lancers. The first
to die was Peter Pike, a focused man who hurried to
darkness. And then the earth grew stained with bright
blood as men fell in death close to one another. It was
another place entirely, a place maybe I remember.
It was Woodbridge, 1967, or Pleiku or even
Dienbienphu. Nothing like that mattered much.
The girl I remember, the one who looked so much
like a happy whore, had a '65 Mustang and she was
proud as hell of just that alone. Marlene she was,
from Newark, and she just kept laughing as, each by
each throughout the personnel office, the boys were
walked through, marked off the employment rolls,
as they gave up their jobs upon be drafted, and each
dutifully went off to South Vietnam. They too bled,
some died - each one trying to remember to shield
his neighbor from the final stroke, or thud, or blast,
whatever it may have been. So all fought on, as
a line of living flame. Yes, a line of living flame.
No comments:
Post a Comment