SOLDIERS AT ISHINOMAKi

by Alan Catlin

after a photo by William T. Vollmann

dressed like the ghost platoon
in Kurosawa’s Dream segmented
movie, only the ruins they walk
through are modern day Japan after
Fukoshima reactor meltdown,
rather than Asian island movie
sequence, jungle nightmare,
the dead restored to eternal life
to continue fighting lost cause war or
like seekers questing what lies within
an Unknown Zone in Tarkovsky’s
“Stalker,” undertaking a journey
whose only tangible reward is a small
piece of death’s half-life in a nutshell,
a concrete bunker melting down, or as
modern day spirit patrol in forbidden
radioactive zone, dead-men-living as police,
guarding an inner ring of hell’s half-acre
precisely subdivided into personal plots,
open graves for all who come here,
all those they must scare away.


Alan Catlin has published numerous chapbooks and full length books of poetry and prose. Pygmy Forest Press is publishing the collected "Deep Water Horizon" poems.
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