Blindness will only make him see better. Broken bones will sharpen his wit.
–Karl Shapiro
On 9-11, we were 1st stunned into numb dazes—I remember the same—in the early sixties and there are the many other days … personal to each of us … that stick like bad cooking to our dead-pan minds, they are the memories that scurry about like ants kicked from the order of their hilly homes. I remember the day that Larry Williams’s photo appeared in the Austin Statesman obituaries with the same confident expression I had seen countless times caged under a baseball Catcher’s mask. There he was—set jaw—Green Beret announcing to his known world that he was finished with games, with this life and his name would become the source of rubbings on a long black wall in Washington. Larry had witnessed the same numbness in the dazed moiré moon faces of a kindred people trapped in their country’s anguish while an Army clerk in Saigon and at his homecoming party, he said to me in a whisper, like a prayer, he had to go back, and this time, he had to be in the thick of it … he must be part of an answer, action, not awe—Whitman’s body electric, to Hell with the angst, the numbness … embrace the pain … fire the spirit—eyes wide open to it all—the same wide and kindred eyes that sent Alison, William, Sandra, Jeffery with a throng of students to the Kent State quad in 1970—demonstrating their outrage over their country, the very home that had seeded them with knowledge and the pride of being raised in a land of gallant freedom fighters, a peopled history of grand idealism that somehow had mutated: it was as if there had been a stock take over—war became a corporate boardroom game; where, moves to erase thousands players was taken in the cool air conditioned minds of executives and politicians thousands of miles from the heat and stench of the jungle factory, changing from a war of rescue to a daily body count. So the students did what they could and the pointing of their single fingers were no match for the rifles; but here’s another legacy for us, the pointed single finger even in its fall, still fired the flame that is the inherent instinct burning like a star in the craw of this nation, where ever we single souls abide, we are steeped in the parables found in our many sacred stories; our monumental buildings may fall to the warped logic of our enemies; and this cornucopia of a planet we so treasure, may turn on us, like some old jaded lover, bringing on us all matter of apocalyptic weathering pain rivaling Old Testament curses —We the People—do not sit long sanguine on the comfort of our couches before the gnashing media poor-sayers or dig head-holes of rationale to bury our worst fears in—We the People—are on the march, on the move from our every beach, plain, forest, hill, or cove, on the phone with our support, in the mail with our personal treasures, we are on the many roads and byways with our pyrotechnic presences, in the hot stink of it with our time and boundless talents—brilliant spirits burning white hot— igniting truth deep in our brethren’s breast—We the People—are truly omnipotent—
Dave Parsons, 2011 Texas State Poet Laureate, is a recipient of an NEH Dante Fellowship to SUNY, the French-American Legation Poetry Prize, the Baskerville Publisher’s Prize (TCU). He was inducted into The Texas Institute of Letters in 2009. Parsons has published seven poetry collections. His latest are Reaching For Longer Water (2015) and Far Out Poems of the ’60s (2016), co-edited with Wendy Barker. He has taught Creative Writing at Lone Star College since 1992. Parsons has four grown children and lives with wife Nancy, an award winning artist and graphic designer in Conroe, Texas. The title and many lines of this poem were taken from a poem that first appeared in his collection, Color of Mourning (Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press Consortium, 2007), edited for the Writers Resist movement.
Visit his website at www.daveparsonspoetry.com.
Reading recommendation: Color of Mourning by Dave Parsons
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