This is called Elegy, and this is for my cousin John who
was killed in Vietnam in 1967.
I tried to write something for him since 69,
actually I started in 69 and I could never
do anything and then the spring of 83
I was finally able to write this poem.
And after that there's just to me
a flood of poems about Vietnam I wrote, one poem about Vietnam
and I watched that PBS series on Vietnam
and then I wrote-- then I read Fire in the Lake,
and I read the Shawcross book on Cambodia,
and then I wrote a poem that loosely deals with Cambodia.
And by the end I was just totally, totally exhausted.
Just dealing with it--
I don't think that I'm through with it yet,
actually there there's something else kicking around in there,
but it's very depressing.
I went to the killing fields a few weeks ago too,
and I made this--
told myself-- hypnotized myself so
that I wouldn't think about it that night,
but the next morning it just all came back about 5:00
in the morning and that was really so intense.
This is called The Elegy for my cousin John.
One.
Hundreds of flies rise from my face
and I feel as if I'm flying, but it's only a daydream.
I'm 75 in the Veterans' Hospital and this isn't 1917.
On TV Saigon is splitting apart like a cheap Moroccan leather
suitcase, and we are leaving it all behind, our dirty, dirty
laundry.
Maybe it's the right thing to do,
maybe soldiers are reborn infinitely
to do each century's killing and mopping up.
We stand at attention in full dress.
A general rides by in an open car and we cheer.
How I cheered: here's to the trenches, the mud,
the bullet riddled days and nights,
that one night in November 1917 when
I thought I was dead, when I felt myself
rising straight for the moon's green cheesy heart, but I
wasn't dead.
I was on a troop ship in the English Channel 27 years later
and nothing had changed.
Last night I dreamed about my mother.
She was pregnant with me and I was also there with her
as a young man.
I wanted to end it inside her womb with my bayonet,
and somehow I cut my way to the child.
I took him by the feet, and flung
him high over a smoky black rainbow.
Two.
Suddenly my body jerks forward then back,
and just as suddenly the TV screen darkens
and the voices of the journalists fade,
then hang in the air like whispers,
as the orderly takes hold of my wheelchair.
When we move down the hallway, small, almond-eyed people
cheer as I roll by.
I recognize them all: that one was with me
in the trenches, that went in the concentration camp,
and that vapor there from Nagasaki.
The orderly lifts me into bed and folds the blanket
across my chest.
Imagining things, I say to him.
Well, what if I am?
Just lower the coffin, let those clods of earth come down
like 100 blows.
You say never you, never, but when it's your turn
you'll pack your sweet dreams in your old kit bag and go,
and on that true last day you and I
will rise toward heaven like two great brass
notes from Gabriel's horn.
We'll shout, hallelujah, the war is over.
We'll shout the gates of heaven down.
[APPLAUSE]