Assault in Primary Colors

The sky was blue, the grass bright green;
The whitest cloud you've ever seen
Drifted gently, all alone,
Over the wire in the killing zone.

The sun, a yellow disk, burned bright,
And put the morning mists to flight;
The song of a bird in the high clear air
Came through amid the napalm's glare.

Around the world is darkest night,
The moon and stars glow shiny, bright,
Mothers tuck children snug in bed;
My boots are full of blood, bright red.

Of all the things that I have seen,
The jungle is the deepest green;
The ocean gently laps the sand.
I hold a grenade in a trembling hand.

Our shots flew true to young men's hearts;
The barbed wire full of body parts.
My days seem filled with remembered screams,
But I can't, as yet, remember my dreams.

I HEAR AN ARMY

I hear an army, beyond the near hill;
the stamping of a thousand horses, anxious,
nervous to run.
The dust of a thousand wagon wheels,
soon to carry the soon dead, drifting
a yellow fog, beyond the near hill.

A thousand swords, jostling and clinking
a thousand shields; the glitter of sweat
from beneath a thousand bright helmets,
winking in the sun.
Heat waves rising from black iron cannon,
barrels roasting in the sun.
Heat waves rising from the sun-scorched thighs
of a thousand mounted riders, armored
in brown leather, gripped tight
around a thousand anxious horses,
steaming to run.

I hear an army; hear the mumbled curses
at sweat stinging a thousand eyes,
squinting and waiting in a yellow
bright fog of dust and sun
and anxious horses. Hear
the muffled bumping sound of reins
held taut by hands burning in gauntlets
of leather and iron.

On bright Sunday mornings, I hear an army;
when children sit up sleepy-eyed.
And fathers, picking up the morning paper
from the dew-soaked lawn, pause...
and turn a puzzled gaze toward the near hill;
...when mothers pause... at brushing their hair
in front of mirrors, and stare
toward some odd clanking noise
beyond the window.

I hear an army on Sunday morning,
waiting in hot yellow dust,
on stamping horses;
among jungle vines and leeches,
dripping with malaria;
in slit-trenches of waist deep mud,
in stinging cordite fog;
lying behind dunes of griddle-hot sand,
in strange deserts;
in tossing landing craft just off beaches;
in wet nausea and fear.

The oddest thing... on Sunday morning,
I pause at my coffee, cup half raised...
I hear an army, clear as day;
a thousand swords, sharpened to molecule keeness;
a thousand shields, polished to mirror brightness;
a thousand horses, anxious, nervous to run...

Night Event

Blood-mist in a broken dream,
ghastly black-on-orange scream.
Soundless detonation, flash,
concussion, shattered eardrum, smash.

(Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright)
atomized flesh diffusing light,
moans reduced to bubbles fight
for breath through splintered jaws that cry,
(What Immortal Hand Or Eye)
(Could Frame Thy Fearful Symmetry?)
spray blood from what was once a mouth
(flash...concussion, somewhere South)
onto what was once a chest,
twitches quiet to that rest
that awkward Death can lone supply.

Glasses cracked in blood-fogged air
condense a pinkish film that smears.
Muffled silence, eyes blink blind,
flames throw yellow light behind.

The Thing That Almost Happened

Some breakthrough eludes me.
Each time the pencil touches paper,
the brush canvas,
the eye a darting swift,
I feel a verge.

While the wrestlers are locked
in mock combat on Channel 27,
the wind blows off a shingle
that exposes a long-dark roof beam
to light that has travelled for years
in a straight line
from Arcturus.

Someone touches someone's face
somewhere, eyes meet,
gentle hands stroke the cat's ear;
we watch the sun set in red
and orange and white.
Tired petals fall from a rose.
Something waits to happen.

Children die of starvation in Africa
while their fathers in Ireland, Somalia,
and Yugoslavia kill each other
over injustices done to their grandfathers
by Ottoman Turks.

Historians in southern universities
begin editing second drafts
analyzing the Battle Of Shiloh.
The Lone Ranger and My-Three-Sons
are launched into space again and again
at the speed of light.

Twelve year old boys stand at trackside
as the freight rumbles by,
then step up on the rails to feel
the vibration through their feet,
as cotton clouds
twist in a blue, blue sky.

Women wake before their husbands,
and looking at the stubbly face
made slack by sleep,
roll away and do not love them
anymore.

Autumn moths float in on the dark
to have their wings singed
by bulbs that light patios
where men stand alone
and smoke cigarettes
and stare up at Orion.

Heroes,

(Twenty years ago),
Forsook the earth, and leaned
Against a spray of steel,
To drag a blasted comrade
Into the ditch;
To die among friends;
And not out there amongst
The blossoming of shells.