patrickmurfin

It’s Memorial Day in the sixth year of a misbegotten war.  Most of those yellow ribbon car magnets have long since disappeared.  The American flags that were ubiquitous on almost every house after 9/11 and again in the early days of the war are mostly gone, too.  There may be a mild irony that up and down Ridge Avenue, the residential street that runs along the side of my house, this house with its locally notorious anti-war resident, is the only home flying a flag. I got a new one Saturday.  I always keep on display from Memorial Day through Veteran’s Day.  I never wanted the jingoists to take my patriotism or my flag away.

The war and its casualties are hardly news now.  Four inch stories on page 3 or 4 are the norm now.  The pundits tell us Americans have “moved on” and are now concerned more by the price of gas and the collapsing economy.  The war has “lost traction” as a political issue in a hot Presidential contest.

Locally, the return of “our heroes” is regular news in the NORTHWEST HERALD.  Every week or so soldier returns home to McHenry County either for good or for a brief rest after a deployment in the war zone.  Each and everyone is met by the motorcycle riding members of the Patriot Guard and escorted home.  And each one gets a write-up with pictures.

But no body much wants to think about a war despised by 70% of the American people but which everyone seems powerless to end.

In the mean time thousands of young American men and women are dead or damaged.  And hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.

For the third year, I am observing Memorial Day with this poem.  An edited version appeared in WE BUILD TEMPLES IN THE HEART.  What follows here is the restored original.

PICTURES, POPPIES AND STARS

A SONG OF GENERATIONS

We knew war.

Somewhere in every home a handsome young man peered from a tinted photograph,
       overseas cap at a jaunty angle,
             or the fifty mission crush,
                   or the crisp square white beanie of a gob,
       usually someone’s Dad in some other life,
       but sometimes a ghost frozen in time,
       caught in that picture like a fly in amber
       while bloody shreds were left draped on barbed wire
       ten feet from low water on an anonymous beach,
           or splattered on the glass of the ball turret
                 of a Mitchell bomber spiraling for a date
                 with a German potato field,
                       or bobbing in a sea of burning oil
                        naked and parboiled.

We knew pity.

The veterans in neat blue uniforms,
     sleeves pinned to shoulders, ears shot away,
          noses burned off, faces twitching,
               fistfuls of red paper poppies in one hand
                    shaking white cans for nickels with the other
                    on every street corner, May and November,
     and no decent man or woman passed
     without emptying pockets of change,
     twisting flowers into button holes
     without ever looking the peddler in the eye.

We knew death.

Inside scrapbooks, brittle pages and fading ink,
     kept far up in the closet behind hat boxes
          surrounded by last winters scarves and mittens,
               between leatherette boards tied by black laces,
               amid the ration coupons and V-mail, 
               postcards from exotic ports, Brownie snapshots, 
               campaign maps, and yellow clippings
     a small fringed flag, edged in red and blue,
          a gold star in the center.

In the neighborhood,
     we looted footlockers and duffel bags,
          saved our dimes for the Army/Navy Store,
           outfitted ourselves in helmet liners,
           webbed belts, canteens and mess kits,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               smatterings of cast off khaki and drab,
     and amid the prairie burrs and grasses,
          between the wild rose hedge and lilac caves,
               on top of the car port and in the window wells,
     every summer day we sorted glory from horror.

We knew war, and pity and death.
We thought.

And then, suddenly, it was our turn for real,
games and fantasy were over,
we had to make grown up choices.

Some went to war with swagger; some with tears
     some went to Canada, some to prison
          and some took another toke and shrugged
     in the safe cocoon of a high number.

We knew war and pity and death.

Now, my grandchildren, it’s your turn.

What do you know?
What will you do?

--Patrick Murfin