Night Stalkers
Back in the 50s and early 60s,
smalltown rural Pennsylvania,
kids could camp with their buddies
in somebody’s backyard, or even
the public park down by the creek.
Our parents never worried about us.
Pedophiles didn’t lurk in the bushes.
Nobody locked their doors.
There’d been only one murder
in Perkasie folks could remember.
Burglaries few, kidnappings never.
We would wander the streets
for the sheer excitement of being
afoot while the whole town slept,
the town’s one cop car easy enough
to avoid, hide in the bushes,
imagine we’re soldiers on patrol,
evading the Krauts and the Japs.
The sound of a dog barking,
maybe another, barking at cats,
barking at us or the moon.
The moon like a Cheshire cat,
or a face: the Man in the Moon.
The Milky Way. The Big Dipper.
How could we have known
what awaited us in the darkness
of future years, too young to even
imagine a future, let alone our own?
Once, we raided Old Man Bowen’s
garage, knowing he always kept
cookies and Cokes in his workshop
fridge, but we didn’t take them all.
Battalion Scouts, Quang Tri, Vietnam, October 1967
_______________________________________________________________________________________
The Uselessness of Words
for the innocent in Gaza,
the Occupied Territories,
and throughout the world
How does one respond to such destruction
with a poem? Can poetry outweigh
a 2,000-pound Mark-84 bomb,
save the life of a single wounded child,
put an end to the hatred and madness
and inhumanity of those who do
the butchery? Might just as well be
pissing up a rope as thinking poetry
can matter where it really counts
there among the dead and dying,
armless, legless, homeless, starving,
families shattered, orphaned children,
misery without hope of ever ending.
And here I sit in safety half a world
away. My tax dollars buying bombs
my government supplies to those who
do the killing. How can one be silent
in the face of such ignoble cruelty?
How can one just turn away as if
it wasn’t happening, as if I weren’t
responsible, as if I didn’t care.
I suppose I could refuse to pay
my taxes, get myself arrested
doing civil disobedience
in front of Independence Hall,
write letters to my representatives
in Congress. But we’ve done all that
and more for more than half a century
and yet the killing just goes on and on.
One finds it hard, indeed impossible,
to dodge concluding that humanity
is, taken on the whole, just inhumane,
stark raving mad, beyond redemption.
I’d like to think I’m wrong, but this poem
is all the evidence that I can offer.
W.D. Ehrhart's newest books are Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems and a revised edition of Passing Time: Memoir of a Vietnam Veteran Against the War, both from McFarland.