OK, I'll read two more poems.
One I'm going to read because we are
dealing with the 10-year anniversary of the Iraq War.
This is a poem that was actually part of what was generated over
at Arizona State.
There was a discussion with Alberto Rios
and some young soldiers who were traveling around the country
and talking about their experiences, and a group of us
were gathered together in the Piper Center.
And all of us realized we had never lived in peacetime.
This is called "The Warring States Period."
"1.
Studying the list of Chinese dynasties,
I soon come to the Warring States Period,
231 years from 480 to 249 BCE, paralleling
the time the area of the Parthenon was just a sheepfold,
about 150 years after Sappho was born.
2.
My birthday places me in the middle of World War II.
I was born in wartime and lived most of my life
during hot and cold wars.
They were never really as far away or foreign
as we used to call them.
Even now there are still chapters
of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the battles of those wars
living inside them and not one soldier
ever able to return to a spring or autumn period
before a warring state became his lot.
3.
Vietnam was my war because it changed
everything I thought about my country, my 'tis of thee.
Every night, the body counts broadcast
across the dinner table on the nightly news,
Nixon's secret Cambodian invasion leaked, and weeks
later, Kent State students gunned down
while I was teaching a high school English class.
After that war, I gave up on the truth press secretaries tell
as I had given up on Charlie McCarthy
once I was old enough to not look at the dummy
but at the man whose lap he was sitting on.
4.
Folded in a wooden glass-topped case
in my workroom, the flag under which my father's coffin rested
in the dim light of Lady's Chapel.
The crowd that came to his funeral mass
spilled out onto the street.
Young guys and the retired, best boys,
able gaffers, special effects men,
and some of my father's buddies from 885th Ordnance/China Burma
India, 1943 to '45.
Men of work or war, my father both.
5.
On my bookcase, I keep a small jewelry box
Dad made for my mother from a cast-off mortar shell.
It opens with a pleasant ring, much
like the chime of the Tibetan prayer
bowl sitting on my poetry shelf that
starts with The Art of the Lathe by BH Fairchild
and ends with Clean Energy Verse, a chapbook of poetry
from 1979, "The Plutonium Ode" by Allen Ginsberg autographed
by him, page 12.
6.
All warriors, all flags, all lie down."
Maybe I'll just leave it at that.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]