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Guns |
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Again we
pass that field
green artillery piece squatting
by the Legion Post on Chelten Avenue,
its ugly little pointed snout
ranged against my daughter's school.
"Did you ever use a gun
like that?" my daughter asks,
and I say, "No, but others did.
I used a smaller gun. A rifle."
She knows I've been to war.
"That's dumb," she says,
and I say, "Yes," and nod
because it was, and nod again
because she doesn't know.
How do you tell a four-year-old
what steel can do to flesh?
How vivid do you dare to get?
How explain a world where men
kill other men deliberately
and call it love of country?
Just eighteen, I killed
a ten-year-old. I didn't know.
He spins across the marketplace
all shattered chest, all eyes and arms.
Do I tell her that? Not yet,
though one day I will have
no choice except to tell her
or to send her into the world
wide-eyed and ignorant.
The boy spins across the years
till he lands in a heap
in another war in another place
where yet another generation
is rudely about to discover
what their fathers never told them. |
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Copyright © 1993 by W. D. Ehrhart
The Distance We Travel, New Voices Publishing Company, 1993
This poem currently appears in Thank You For Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Company, 2019 |
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