WEBVTT

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Well, it seems that war
has never come to an end

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and we've taken over from the
Germans fighting it ourselves.

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And I tried to write a poem
about the war in Vietnam

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a couple of years ago
and wouldn't come right

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until I began writing
about the war that I knew,

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which is our war, same war.

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The war, the aspect, in
many different theaters--

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Vietnam is only one.

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And this poem is called
"How much longer,"

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which is the title I took from
caption one of Goya's etchings,

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Disasters of War.

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"How much longer."

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Let me find a newer
version of it.

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Day after day after
day it goes on

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and no one knows how
to stop it or escape.

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Friends come bearing
some vague agony.

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I hear our hopeless laughter.

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I watch us drink.

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War is in everyone's eyes.

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War is made in the
kitchen, in the bedroom,

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in the car at stoplights.

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A marriage collapses
like a burning house

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and the other houses smolder.

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Old friends make
their way in silence.

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Students stare at their teachers
and suddenly feel afraid.

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The old people are terrified
like cattle rolling their eyes

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and bellowing while the young
wonder in darkness, dazed,

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half believing some half
forgotten poem or else

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come out with their hearts on
fire alive in the last days.

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Armed children roam
the neighborhoods

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with submachine guns, gas
masks, and riot sticks.

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Excavations are made
in us and slowly we

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are filled in with
used up things.

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Knives too dull
to cut bread with,

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bombs that failed to go off.

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Cats smashed on the highway,
slivers of soap, hair, gristle,

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old TV sets that hum and stare
out blindly like the insane.

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Bridges kneel down.

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The cities billow and plunge
like horses and their smoke.

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The tall buildings open
their hysterical burning eyes

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at night.

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The leafy suburbs look up
at the clouds and tremble.

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And my wife leaves her bed
before dawn walking the icy

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pasture, shrieking
her grief to the cows,

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praying in tears to the
softening blackness.

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I hear her outside the
window, crazed, inconsolable,

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and go out to fetch her.

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Yesterday she saw a photograph,
Naomi, our little girl,

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in a ditch, in Vietnam,
half in the water.

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The rest of her, beached on
the mud, was horribly burned.

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