[Newspoetry] Nostalgic Memories of the Way We Are

[Donald L Emerick]

"The most remarkable thing was the extent to which
Kennedy was in pain every day of his presidency." 
JEFFREY A. KELMAN, QUOTE OF THE DAY
on President John F. Kennedy's medical records.

Nostalgic Memories of the Way We Are

The annual JFK Assassination Festival Story,
comes only a few mourning days before
the annual Day to Live in Infamy Festival,
and just after the Old Warriors' Festival,
for they never die nor even fade away either,
though, themselves, always innocent as lamb-dads,
fed on pork-chopped-up hills, alive with the sounds of muses,
screaming and moaning in condensed fogs of mustard gas,
lit by joyful flames of orange agents on napalm leafed paths,
and the discovery of ways to unmake atoms
to make energetic enemas of all of the people,
and, ever better, of ways to mass produce
once occasional plagues and old scourges.

We are truly fortunate, ourselves,
to have had some war in our own time,
that our children will have something to regret
that they missed when they are growing up,
something new for the subject of movies,
and video games, and theme park rides --
and our children will thus come to know
the only way to have the thrill of a war
is to go out and find one of your own to fight.

JFK had pain every day in his presidency?
Well, excuse me if I don't give a damn,
not right now, and maybe never again --
and is this the best Quote of the Day?

Hell, I could find plenty of people to interview --
presently living people feel plenty of pain today!

Yeah, I know -- your pain or my pain or their pain
is not newsworthy, not today, and maybe not ever,
except almost accidentally and incidentally, perhaps,
as some disputed and incidental and abstract statistic,
a thing that is counted and measured and weighed,
and, more importantly and most often, simply ignored
as the inconsequential and insignificant thing that it is,
a thing that happens to someone who is not someone,
and thus is beneath the dignity of being mentioned,
in memories named as pained protests against war.

Now, we did build a holy wall, to wail against,
after 'Nam, we did inscribe all their names there,
and all those names do all get read, every year,
and with great marketing success, widely imitated,
but, the most recent reading of all those names
makes those names sound as though every one
of those men and women would rise up and say,
"Hell, yes, 'Nam was a war worth dying for!
I was happy to die for my country's cause!"

When a phrase is repeated, over and over,
shifts through layers of sounds and meanings
until it has no meaning or sound once proper to it,
a more crucial phase shift for a world of nations
than found in Doppler frequency modulations.

Today's is quite a different tone of reading than
the reading of the names had when the Friends did it
in memory of some of the senseless wastes of war.

Even if we built an anti-war memorial
right smack-dab in the middle of the Mall,
within a few years it would be converted
to a War Memorial, to glorify the Hateful God
who stands over America in American Wars,
for that God turns all things to His own ends.

Ah, what a world,
what a world,
what a world of war.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick

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