memorial

Senior class trip,
Washington D.C., what a joke.
Take a bunch of kids
seventeen, eighteen years old
and oblivious to anything
besides themselves.
Tour the nation’s capital in two days.
Talk about football, look, the Lincoln memorial.
Talk about girls, hey, there goes another monument.
Talk about music, what did we just pass?
Talking, talking mouths working making strange,
inconsequential noises
that reverberate off marble and steel
dedicated to the memory of
great men and women.
What a joke.

One touched me.
I take that back, it reached out and slapped me.
Wall of black stone,
filled high and wide with the names of strangers.
Soldier, sailor, airman, marine to their country.
Sons, brothers, fathers, lovers to someone
ten thousand miles away.
Drafted, volunteered, they lay side by side
on a slab of inky black.
They fixed cars in driveways on sunny summer days
and joked with buddies, talked about girls,
football, and music.
They cleaned rifles hunkered in sandbag bunkers
smoking cigs and talked about when they’d get back to ‘the World’.
They fell in triple canopy, rice paddies and mud,
like someone just cut their strings.

When the light hits it just right
I can see my reflection in the polish.
I see dead men looking back at me.
Some are no older than I,
but they’ve seen tracers spit across a field,
heard the whine of incoming,
shed their childhood for camouflage,
and that counts for more than age.

Right about then my friends come back for me
and wave hands in front of my face. Laughing.
“Hey, zombie... whatre you staring at? We’re
heading back to the bus. This whole trip, what a joke huh?”
Yeah, I reply.

What a joke.