Memorial Day 1991

A day set aside for our dead, our wartime dead:
a son, a brother newly wed,
a father his son will never see
or a daughter 
too little to even to remember...

 And what do we do for the mothers
but tell them lies?
And the wives of husbands: 
how bravely died
when most soldiers in combat are scared shitless!

None want to die
and I suppose we might even praise dying
except… 
except we immediately move on 
to another war, 
a next opportunistic engagement
to create more dead, more wounded
and, worst, even one paraplegic!

So we treat our young, the young so anxious to be heroes,
so again must die
with medics and buddies to support them,
and who also die.

There’s no honor in pursuit of war.
So we boast of a “little war” 
in which bombs applied exceed the total 
dropped on Germany in World War II!
Thus, do we crow, 
we vicarious old men with remotes
in reclining chairs.

TV was never so good!

And what exactly are we cheering?
More Arabs dead? More oil?
Freedom for those who didn’t ask it?
What have we won,
but just another Viet Nam?

 More squalor and even less valor! 

We’re a country that likes to bully,
most of all find cheer
in the body counts of enemy
who are hard to kill,
put an honorable face on our killing
with loud parades.

 It may be that war is inevitable.

We grew up on war, 
cut our teeth on violence and killing:
stole land from Indians, 
brought Africans to America,
first of all as slaves,
then conscripted them to fight our wars,
but not as heroes.

 As for black men killed from our cities,
we do not mourn,
nor lower our flag in recognition.
We don’t even regulate arms.
Instead, use the undereducated to fight our wars
from which they will get no benefit.

Such sleazy sport!

This Memorial Day
could we not especially honor from our cities
those Blacks who were treated as fodder, 
thus robbed of their chance for survival.
their young lives gone,
as those who were lost in Viet Nam
and now Irag; 

the sellers of crack cocaine
and those who bought,
but are never cited as heroes,
but are just as dead;
or who sit in prison
and who, upon release,
will just shoot up;

 disgusting men,
outrageous, angry and sullen,
whom a gun makes right,
in the way it makes the President right,
but without parades;
without a Day of Remembrance,
but also victims 
without a trace of political advantage.

And who will tell
the story to those who come after,
to the ones unborn,
how this country depends on violence
and how we scorn
any answer but the violent answers,
should some be left.