This Time, Yesterday

“This time, yesterday,” I tell a poor victim at the pub,

“I dug in to a paper so goddam old—”

Three glasses of whiskey and I was still on my feet!

“A real manuscript, you see, all torn n' yellow 'round the edges,

Where rusted needles pinned it for years,

'gainst the linoleum wall."

Now you said,

"Was it your grandfather's?"

And impatiently, I said

"My lover this I am yet to know."

Together, we opened it and read:

“December 3, 1945.

To-day an old woman spake such:

Young man, you must assimilate

You must adjust

You must face youth with virtue.

And in me that moment,

The soldier, all fired up and red

Looked at her with sorrowed fate.”

...

“I wondered then of truth in her words

But I was too afraid

Who had won this time— I admit

So today, I shall away

With my rambling soldier days

And give myself whole

To be a god-lover.”

❈❈❈❈❈

Out of remorse, we saved the dry flower pots

From well-wishers of the war.

We are soldiers, we thought.

“It could not matter, all is fleeting...”, and such— we believed

But you see, our class-rooms

Ever were thus obscene,

Creeping on our young brains

Like hyenas, round leathery carcasses

Like vultures; picking and cussing,

Revealing by minutes the walls, and passages

And hallways, and corners

Of our naïve little minds

Feeding us perversions,

Breeding in us bloody essences;

But O, why? For of course—

To break the freezing dove,

To erase the boulders of love

To show us the light.

As children we laid like stars

At the cuffs of ignorance—

Our lips were fearful, ever sealed.

But after the war came,

How could they be not untamed

When we spake of open crucifixions

And gaped at public hangings?

And once— we were all together

Like chilies laid out in the summer sun,

We dried ourselves on muslin flatbeds

Huddled in the chilly nights, ever close to each other

And tried as the soldiers could, those vultures

Never could feed on our brothers.

But O, now we are grown up,

Our fires, distant from home

And today, those bedcloths, we witness

Turning from the yellow of our scriptures old

To red, blood red.