I'll read one more and then Gene Frumkin will take over here.
Why don't we look at "War in Massachusetts?"
I'm not going to dump on the middle west all night.
[LAUGHTER]
Or make fun against Barry Goldwater flying overhead.
Read a poem, "War in Massachusetts."
Now this is kind of a death poem.
This is probably the subtlest.
Not in my form, which is free verse,
and doesn't have subtlety to it, which I carefully
have kept out.
If we're dealing with-- there's nothing subtle about death,
and it shouldn't be anything subtle about--
Imagine a poem where a boy digs up
coffins and cuts women's head off done in iambic pentameter
and a sonnet form.
[LAUGHTER]
It doesn't seem to move me somehow.
This is another kind of a death.
The death of waiting around where you're born in.
Staying there, and people around you
are doing things and coming home as heroes.
And you never become a hero.
You're either too young or too old,
and not in the right place at the right time,
or whatever it is it makes make those accidents that
make heroes.
Heroes instead of flaws.
The accidental cowardice that makes a man fight for his life.
Not for someone else but to get out of a situation,
he's called a hero.
In other fields you don't receive medals for killing.
This is a poem about my father, who never
received a medal for anything.
Which I'm very happy about.
He was too young for the First World War, too old
for the second.
I was too young for anything.
And it is a statement to him.
I address it dramatically to him, "Father" kind of a poem.
It is an experiment to try to find out what was happening.
Was anything really happening in Massachusetts while we were
sending men over to save Charles de Gaulle for a second time?
Was anything really happening?
What are the byproducts of a war in which people are getting
killed, in which your own family doesn't suffer?
You go in and stand in a sugar line and a butter line,
and you make believe that if there are two people that you
split up and make believe you're from different families.
And then you get double rations that way.
And that is one way in which you find out what it
is to live on a ration basis.
You also know what it is when they
have mock aircraft come over.
And the civil defense people look down,
and if they don't see any lights then they
know that this is pretty safe.
And then if the Jerrys ever did come over, Boston and the area
would be saved.
The only trick was that at 60 years old,
I was never told that this is just a practice mission.
I've been neurotic ever since.
And everyone is just sitting around very calmly,
and they say "They're bombers, honey.
They're bombers going over."
And you're waiting for the bombs, and nothing happens.
It's very moment of anxiety.
Angst sets in.
So it was full few of these peripheral,
or outside of the major areas of the wall,
that I could only write about.
I couldn't write about the war or something
from non experience.
So I tried to show what it is to have a father that
never receives a medal but the guy next door always does.
How did he compensate for it?
"Father, what was that blackout of windows?
Mock aircraft over Tewkesbury.
Hushed we gathered on the midnight braided rug
sipping tea.
The practice bombers trailed off west.
Safely we drained our China cups,
while you loaded shot and mobilized.
Grunty the pig shot for his scarce pork.
I ran too late to his bleeding head.
Blitzed by a nest of green flies.
I glimpsed him hanging squatted, like a foreign spy.
Coldly you fetched me from his demise.
Behind white shades drawn against the light.
Those mornings unlikely soldier, your flannel red shirt
spared your life.
Hang it in your own home pasture.
You fired at nothing I could see with untrained eyes.
You marched me guerilla style through fields,
where good surrendered to our impasse like overripe flesh.
Each hunt I fell before the flush, the blast.
We walked back to peace.
Your uneasiness while a neighbor returned, a decorated ace,
was paraded through town and got jipped.
Father, I know why in your 50s with rage,
you splintered your shotgun on the basement floor."
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]