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.
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