SOLDIER FROM KANSAS

[jim turner]

Grant me this leave. Let me play
my part where my helmet is hung
on my piece--well out of your way. *
Have no word spoken, no song sung.
I would not hear. See? I ignore
red fury; hot, metallic rain;
my shaken bed; the battle's score.
I will neither move nor explain.

Once, on your strange world, I stood tall
for one who weeps to have me found.
Quiet her far, importunate call
with a clod of this callous ground.
Let me sleep! Her Kansan tears fall
in Oz, with an alien sound. **

Jim about 2000

*Piece is military for rifle; shallow graves have often been so marked–by a now useless helmet hung on the butt of a rifle, bayoneted into the ground.
**My personal imagining, that if the dead do see this world it would be to them strange and meaningless.

[SmileGRL]

jim, this poem not only brings home the weariness and battle of the soldier, but also the loved ones waiting at home and how will we explain our destructive wars to anyone looking from the outside in. it all seem so unnecessary that we kill each other in the name of what? when life (and love) is sacred and hard enough as it is.

[judih]

spoken with dignity and logic, Jim,
something that the living might consider

[stilltrucking]

Yes the logic and dignity of war.

[Sue Littleton]

Beautiful and poignant, as all your poetry when you talk of battlefields and battles. Have you read Wilfred Owen ...? You should make a book of these poems, Jim. They are worthy. Sue

[jim turner]

Thank you, Sue. Yes, I have read Owen and Sassoon and others. But a book? I wouldn't know where to begin. Besides, it's getting late. jim

[Sue Littleton]

If you mean what I think you mean when you say, "It's getting late," I can only reply, "Think Grandma Moses! Joseph Campbell!" You go, Jim Turner, you go right to the computer and put it together.

Don't forget Rupert Brooks ... I did. But Wilfred Owen is my man. He came to a seance looking for me. At least that is what the medium said ... sort of.

Sue