Cruising nodes,
graphics and files is supposed to be
all technobabble,
but more grows from the alphabet of files
abstracted from the official
list for the Viet Nam Memorial.
No Bloomquist, but Smiths cascade by screensfull,
Smiths from Raleigh to Brawley ...Martinez and Sanchez
and Jones from New York to Umatac... no Megenhardt...
...Last name, first name, rank, home town...
...Last name, first name, rank, home town...
...Last name, first name, rank, home town...
How many quieter rooms have I overflown
in my years since Quang Tri while I
raised three children, finished schools, taught classes,
flew to Houston, Chicago, San Francisco,
White Plains, Seattle or New Orleans
for conventions or vacations?
How many of those -- for me -- unremembered
faces from basic training were booby-trapped or
rocketed to national honor in perpetuity?
How many quieter streets have I driven
in Seattle, San Diego, Cincinnati, Johnsonburg,
Tulsa, Portland, Palatine, Spokane?
How many mothers less a son
have waited in the lane beside me
for the traffic light to turn?
Screen by screen, the surnames
flicker by, and I recall the researcher
at that last convention who
reported on oral histories taken
from families whose beloved had been
sent home boxed, flagged, with official regrets.
Embarrassed that questions about the lost brother,
sister, husband/father, too young son too soon gone,
triggered tears with the torrential answers,
researchers always apologized,
offered to stop, and always,
survivors protested:
"O no! Don't stop!
It's been over twenty years,
now,
and you are the first one willing to
listen!"
(c) Copyright R. S. Carlson
1996
First published in
The Iconoclast
32 (May
1996):22-23.
Send comments on the poem to QuangTri71@aol.com
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