Poetry is Good for America
Frost
In the bleak winter
An invisible threat came
Isolating all
Bud
The middle of spring
People and flowers bursting
Contained no longer
Sunburn
The warm sun ripens
Messenger of the old gods
Bringing boys of summer?
Reaping
In Fall the Harvest
Rejoicing or full mourning
Bringing in the sheaves
Around Thirteen hundred and forty-five
In Genoa, a ship arrived
With sickly crew barely alive
Quayside the barque was ill at ease
The smell of death was on the breeze
A town brought down by rats and fleas
Bulbous from bacteria in the bite
Of the fleas put the metropole to flight
Initiating the darkest medieval fright
From Genoa like a martial plan
The plaque marched ruthless across the land
Soon to Florence and Milan
Civilization came unbound
A third of Europe could be found
Far too soon planted in the ground
The Black Death brought in its aftermath
A new human value that set the path
A society reforming millennial bath
A renaissance came to be
For learning, for arts, for industry,
The breaking of feudalism and the setting free
Of hearts and minds and the labor of men
The Disease is not how this story ends
Catastrophe allows for greatness to begin
The story is bleak but also true
Europe recovered and we will too
Perhaps to a renaissance anew
Let us not fear or worry or doubt
Let our revival be what we are about
To be better people when our plague plays out.
When your future is uncertain
And your world filled with stress,
Can you mitigate the worst,
And still work for the best?
Can you find hope and happiness
Despite the setbacks,
While girding yourself daily
For life’s constant attacks?
In your moments of sorrow,
Can you still find some ways
To look beyond the chaos-
See through to better days?
Can you view the great maelstrom
And recognize how the spin
Is nothing more or less
Than how opposing currents descend?
Our lifetime is a struggle,
From our birth to our grave,
But all that is required to live successfully
Is to stand and be brave!
So let the storms billow over
Till they lose power and end,
Hold on to your hope
And be human my friend!
My wife doesn’t read my poems
Unless I write on light, airy, happy things
I really don’t blame her
She was there in the dark times
And watched me live through them
She doesn’t enjoy watching
Me rip open old wounds
To see if the maggots
Are still lingering inside
She doesn’t know
The names of my demons
But she knows their sounds-
A scream out from my sleep
She knows how they feel-
As I alternate between clawing at her
And pushing her out of bed
To get her down
Below the line of fire
Another soldier to save
From the deadly battlefield
She knows the demon’s shape and smell-
I’m suddenly upright at 3AM
Stagnant and salty in my cold sweat
I dreamt again of the day I stood up tall
Atop the armored vehicle
To prove that it was safe
To get everyone to stop firing
To try and get a grip on
Indiscipline driven by fear
Exposing myself yet again
Because someone needed
To calm the panic
Of overactive imaginations
And that task fell to me
Because it was my responsibility
To assess the risks
And to get the job done
Sometimes in my dream
The sniper IS still there
And I’m wrong in my assessment
So I don’t walk away
After standing up
To get everyone’s attention
Instead of being in charge
Of evacuating the wounded
In this dream, I’m on the ground
At the Casualty Collection Point
And Doc Turner is trying
To get the bleeding stopped
As the demons circle round me
I hate being wrong
And not being in control
Then suddenly I’m bolted awake
Sitting upright in a cold sweat
And I can feel the maggots
Crawling around under my skin
And I’m never completely sure
If this means the wounds are rotten
Or if this is medicinal-
The eating away of dead flesh
So that only living remains.
One can do military math
On a cardboard box
Using slide rules
Whiz wheels and pins
On a plotting board
Solving ballistic geometry
Manually
Safely calculating
All the elements
Of accurate predicted fire
I used to fill out safety tables
In my head and then
On a scrap of green memo paper
That would get passed to the guns
Now computers do the hard work
In zeros and ones
The precision of navigation systems
Blue Force Tracker and
Command Post of the Future
Are supposed to prevent
The errors that used to creep in
To manual gunnery
But
All of my nightmares
From 25 years of service
Have to do with bombs
Artillery rounds and rockets
Falling where they weren’t intended
Miscommunication
Load elevation
Miss-orientation
False identification
Wrong Laser codes
Wrong attack angle
Danger Close
Human error
Gets men and women
Killed
Garbage In
Garbage Out
Flash and Boom
Reverberation
And Then
Radio Silence