[Vision2020] Something to Ponder . . . (please)

Tue Oct 9 23:03:39 PDT 2012

I think, perhaps, the most powerful piece you have ever posted.

Sue

From: Tom Hansen 
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 9:05 PM
To: Moscow Vision 2020 
Subject: [Vision2020] Something to Ponder . . . (please)

How many more names must we add to those lists of names at the base of the war memorial statue in East City Park?

------------------------------------

"The Wall Within" by Steve Mason.

Most real men

hanging

in their early forties

would like the rest of us to think

they could handle one more war

and two more women.

But I know better.

You have no more lies to tell.

I have no more dreams to believe.

I have seen it in your face

I am sure you have noticed it

in mine;

at the unutterable,

unalterable truth of our war.

The eye sees

what the mind believes.

And all that I know of war,

all that I have heard of peace,

has me looking over my shoulder

for that one bullet

which still has my name on it--

circling

round and round the globe

waiting and circling

circling and waiting

until I break from cover

and it takes its best, last shot.

In the absence of Time, the accuracy of guilt is assured.

It is a cosmic marksman.

Since Vietnam,

I have run a zigzag course

across the open fields of America

taking refuge in the inner cities.

>From Mac Arthur Park

to Washington Square

from Centennial Park

to DuPont Circle,

on the grassy, urban knolls of America

I have seen an army of combat veterans

hidden among the trees..

Veterans of all our recent wars.

Each a part of the best of his generation.

Waiting in his teeth for peace.

They do not lurk there

on the backs of park benches

drooling into their socks

above the remote, turtled back of chess player playing soldiers.

They do not perch upon the gutter's lip

of midnight fountains

and noontime wishing wells

like surrealistic gargoyles

guarding the coins and simple wishes

of young lovers.

No.

I have seen them in the quiet dignity

of their aloneness.

Singly, in the confidence

of their own perspective.

And always at the edges of the clearing.

Patrolling like perimeter guards,

or observing as primitive gods,

each in his own way looks out to the park

that he might "see" in to the truth.

...Some, like me

enjoy the comfortable base

of a friendly tree

that we might cock one eye

to the center of the park

toward the rearing bronze horsemen

of other wars

who would lead us backwards to glory.

Daily, they are fragged

by a platoon of disgruntled pigeons

saying it best for all of us.

And with the other eye,

we read the poetry of America the Beautiful

as she combs her midday hair

and eats precise shrimp sandwiches

and salad Nicoise catered by Tupperware--

and never leaves a single crumb.

No wonder America is the only country

in the world which doesn't smell like food.

...and I remember you and me

picnicking at the side

of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the rain

eating the Limas and Ham from the can

sitting easy in our youth and our strength

driving hard bargains with each other

for the C-ration goodies

we unwrapped like Christmas presents.

Somehow it really seemed to matter

what he got versus what you got.

It wasn't easy trading cheese and crackers

for chocolate-covered peanut butter cookies!

And the pound cake--Forget about it!

I knew a guy would cut a hole in it

and pretend it was a doughnut.

For six months I watched that

and refused to ask him about it.

I did finally. And you guessed it.

He hated pound cake.

And remember the water biscuit

that came in its own tin?--

I think they had the moxie to call it a cookie--

it came with the marmalade

and was made by that outfit in Chicago

we promised to burn to the ground someday.

Damn, how did your buddy, the animal,

ever eat that crap?

Then, we'd happily wash down the whole mess

with freckly-faced strawberry Kool-Aid

straight from the canteen

some days there'd be goofy grape

(anything to keep from choking

on the taste of purified water).

Bleck!

But somehow I sensed all the while

that I'd never be able to forgive myself

for enjoying your company so much

or being so good at the game we played.

We were the best--you and I.

In our parks

there are whole other armies of veterans

mostly young and mostly old

but always ageless

who are not alone.

They share with their families

and their friends

these open-aired

above-ground time capsules

of our national culture.

They read aloud to themselves

and their children

from the plaques and statues

monuments and markers

those one-line truths

of our common experience

as if there could be a real significance

in words like Love and Hate tatooed

on the clenched, granite fists of America.

Sometimes, when I am angry

it seems as if I could start my own country

with the same twenty Spill and Spell words

we shake out at the feet of our heroes

like some crone spreading her hands

over the runes prior to a mystic reading.

Words like:

peace and sacrifice, war and young

supreme and duty, service and honor

country, nation, men and men and men again,

sometimes God and don't forget women!

Army Air Force, Navy, Marines and freedom.

Then, just as quickly, the anger passes

and reverence takes its place.

Those are good words, noble words, solemn

and sincere.

It is the language of Death

which frightens me;

it is unearthly to speak life concepts

over the dead.

Death is inarticulately final

refusing forever to negotiate.

That, and the awesome responsibility

we place eternally on our fallen

teenage sons,

seems unbearably heavy

against the lengthening prancing

shadows of Sunday's frisbees.

Apparently, there is no period

which can be placed after sacrifice.

All life is struggle.

an act of natural balance

and indomitable courage.

As it is with man

so it is with mankind.

If we permit Memorial Day

to come to us every day,

we ignore the concept of sacrifice

and dilute its purpose.

When we do that

we incur the responsibility

to effect change.

If we are successful,

the sacrifice has renewed meaning

It seems there is no alternative to life.

But there may be to war...

The values of our society

seem to be distributed in our parks

and find only confusion and sadness.

Strange, I have observed no monuments

to survivors.

No obelisk to mark the conflict

of those who risked

and lived perhaps to fight again

or perhaps to speak of peace.

Nowhere, yet, a wall for the living.

There is no wonder

guilt is the sole survivor of war.

We do not celebrate like after combat

because our concept of glory

lives neither in victory nor in peace

but in Death.

The are plaques at the doorsteps

of skyscrapers;

in New York on the 10th and the Avenue

of the Americas it reads:

IN MEMORY OF THOSE

FROM GREENWICH VILLAGE

WHO MADE THE SUPREME SACRIFICE

IN THE KOREAN CONFLICT

1950-1953

In Nashville's Centennial Park

in a shaded wood

to one side of the Partheon

built to scale and to the glory

which was Greece,

a small statue stands;

it is inscribed:

I GAVE MY BEST

TO MAKE A BETTER WORLD

1917-1918

I stood there on fall

ankle deep in leaves

and looked up at the night sky

through a hole in a ceiling of trees

wondering how much better the world

might look from up there.

>From the moon

only one manmade object

can be viewed by the naked eye:

The Great Wall of China

(a tribute to man's functional paranoia).

It's a peculiar perspective

because we're a lot closer

and the only manmade object we see

is THE Wall in Washington, D.C.

(the veterans' solemn pledge to remember)

There is one other wall, of course.

One we never speak of.

One we never see,

One which separates memory from madness.

In a place no one offers flowers.

THE WALL WITHIN.

We permit no visitors.

Mine looks like any of a million

nameless, brick walls--

it stands in the tear-down ghetto of my soul;

that part of me which reason avoids

for fear of dirtying its cloths

and from atop which my sorrow and my rage

hurl bottles and invectives

at the rolled-up windows

of my passing youth.

Do you know the wall I mean?

I learned of mine that night in the rain

when I spoke at the memorial in Washington.

We all noticed how the wall ran like tears

and every man's name we found

on the polished, black granite face

seemed to have our eyes staring back at us,

crying.

It was haunting.

later I would realize

I had caught my first glimpse

of the Wall Within.

And those tears were real.

You and I do not walk about the Wall Within

like Hamlet on the battlements.

No one with our savvy

would expose himself like that

especially to a frightened, angry man.

Suicide loiters in our subconscious

and bears a grudge; an assassin

on hashish. We must be wary.

No. We sit there legless in our immobility

rolling precariously in our self-pity

like ugly Humpty Dumpties

with disdain even for the king's horses

as we lean over the ledge to write

upside down with chalk, bleached white

with our truth

the names of all the other casualties

of the Vietnam War

(our loved one)

the ones Pentagon didn't put in uniform

but died anyway.

Some because they stopped being who

they always were

just as truly as if they'd found

another way to breathe.

Others, because they did die

honest-to-God casualties of the

Vietnam War

because they lost the will

to breathe at all.

My mother gave her first recital

at Carnagie Hall at age eleven.

Sometimes, when I was a boy

I'd watch her play the piano

and wonder if, God, after all, was not a woman.

One evening when I was in the bush

she turned on the 6:00 news

and died of a heart attack.

My mother's name is on the Wall Within.

You starting to get the idea?

Our lists may be different

but shoulder to shoulder

if we could find the right flat cloud

on a perfect, black night

we could project our images

upon a god-size drive-in theatre

wide enough to race Ben Hur across

for a thousand years...

Because the Wall Within

adds up the true cost of war...

We can recite 58,012 in our sleep

even the day after they update it,

but how many of those KIA had kids?

How many of them got nice step-dads?

Whose wall do they go on?

And what about you vets

who came home to your wife and kids

only to divorce her because

there wasn't anyone to be angry at?

------------------------------------

Seeya at the polls, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares"
http://www.MoscowCares.com

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students.  The college students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)

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