And now:[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
At the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial
How quickly the tears come
is a tribute to their valor and to Maya Lin
and the perfection of her vision.
I perform an experiment
for my students back in San Antonio.
Standing before each panel
near the casualty-rich center
I count the seconds
until my eyes find a name
that tells of Indian-Spanish heritage:
A thousand and one--Flores
A thousand and two--Gonzalez
A thousand and three--Zuniga
A thousand and one--Flores
It is a bad day for flowers
and I cannot exceed three seconds.
The air cavalry burns another village to save it as
the choppers clip the morning air over the scent of
jellied gasoline and the sound of crying children
the fresh troops fly in and the body bags fly out.
After they pulled down the tipi
an Arapaho elder
raised a trade goods hatchet-pipe
and the young officer who rode him down
turned to finish the old man
and was almost thrown for
not knowing that a horse
will try not to step on a human being
or not knowing that the elder
struggling to rise on his unbroken arm
was a human being.
Across the grass there is a new monument to the women.
One nurse holds a pressure bandage
on the chest of a fallen warrior
with the heel of her hand
another gazes skyward
for Med Evac.
The smell of powder and the haze it creates and the
constant din-din-din of automatic weapons fire
takes all the senses out of the world but for a
wild shout that cuts through all the overloaded
neural pathways and connects to the here and now:
"Medic! We need a medic!" Women were not supposed
to be battlefield medics, but they forgot to tell
the battlefield.
The young officer ended the encounter
with a pistol shot to the head
close enough to spatter
the blue coat red.
He had another for the elderly woman
uulating over the body.
The statue raised to placate
those who did not share Maya Lin's vision
is not as dreary as I expected.
Three young warriors, bone-tired,
seem to be regarding
the names of their fallen comrades.
I stand beside them, crying.
copyright 1999
Steve Russell
Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine
of international copyright law.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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