Stay-Cation and a Poem

Today is Veterans day, I ask that we stop and we remember. Honor. Today is a holiday for me--no one in my house is off---I am here myself, just me, in my space for 6 solid hours. I'm having a mini-staycation, in black leggings--a cutout-t-shirt that says Danger in the Dirt ( a memento of a hazardous waste clean-up with sensationalized press coverage-graphic includes oily pits and civil servant skeltons hung from trees) and my hair in a pony. I am going to work on photos, submit my recently rejected Death and Dying Poems to somewhere else ( please send positive thoughts their way)--finish reading Robert Wynne's Book--Museum of Parallel Art ( a must read), and sit outside in the sun with a cup of afternoon coffee with my old friend Blondie, then I am going to make eggplant Parmesan for the natives when they come home. I am brain-tired, nesting but mostly groovy. A poem I wrote several years ago for my Uncle Sherman--who died in the service of our country.


A scene in a snow globe, a funeral, a mourner suspended in time
(To Agitate Time, To Invoke God and Child)

Shake
i.
I hold the globe to my ear like a sea shell
Amazing Grace teases my ear
within the inner sea’s roar.

ii.
Snowflakes fall at the cemetery;
mourners matchsticks dipped
in white.

iii.
Gunshots slice air,
threaten the glass in my hand.
A middle-aged man, gray mourning clothes,
tenses, relaxes: 21 times.

Shake
iv.
Tin soldiers, in military blues stand at attention.
Coffin draped with postage-sized flag.
It covers bones, broken, chipped, dust,
flesh and cells sloughed off for renewal
in a Vietnamese rice field. A B-52 lost,
found, life for country. Family
on the nightly news.

v.
My cousin sits.
Still a boy to the man when
the plane went down. I remember
the boy without a father
solemn and sad, except with us.

vi.
A surrogate big brother, torturing
big brother style. Camping trips woken
by a pull of single strand of hair, hiding
rubber hoses under
sleeping bags. Screaming
“snake!”

Shake
vii.
Under the family tent, I stand;
watching the military honor guard.
Their faces carved in stone, razor sharp,
blotched, beautiful, black sometimes brown, and
the basic white.

viii.
They fold over this way, then the other,
in a symphony of quick, sharp, movements.
Wrist snaps, guns tap, pure and precise,
anesthetized and sterile.

ix.
Cousin stands at the coffin
and reaches into his pocket
and pulls out the silver bracelets
bearing his father name.
One for each year.
One for each year categorized “in limbo.”
One for each year unforgotten.
He lays them atop the triangle
of red, white and blue.
A scattering of silver on Old Glory.
The sun reflects, rainbows on snow.

He whispers in the wind:

Mom it took 30 years, I brought him home.

Shake
x.
My mind drifts to Iraq
Life’s sinew, blood and bone
behind the evenings casualty statistics.

xi.
Taps plays; remains lowered
into darkness dug into snow.

xii.

Snowflakes are resilient at this ceremony,
fully-developed and morphing in wind
crystalline lattices dance.
They fall, one delicate prism
on bridge of nose, uniquely slowly
melting from the heat of a sentient body.