by Mel Waldman
Did you hear about the antiwar rally in Washington D.C. ?
It happened Saturday. Hey, that’s nothing new. You see,
I’ve got this uncanny sense of déjà vu.
Demonstrators protested at the National Mall.
Hollywood celebs arrived to attend this ball.
If you were there, perhaps you heard
Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins speak.
And of course, Jane Fonda addressed
the crowd too.
But that’s nothing new. You see,
I’ve got this uncanny sense of déjà vu.
Maybe you remember, or perhaps you don’t-
Vietnam!
Damn!
In the morning of the war, a golden sunrise
soared in the turquoise sky.
We didn’t ask why.
Now, in the evening of the Iraq war,
we see the dying sun, a ball of
chimerical light.
We must demand--NO MORE!
on this endless night
of illusion.
No more troops sent to Iraq to die.
And we must always ask why.
Maybe you remember, or perhaps you don’t. It happened
Saturday. Hey, that’s nothing new. You see,
I’ve got this uncanny sense of déjà vu.
And I see Jane Fonda too,
like the sixties embedded
in my brain.
She was no G.I. Jane,
and we stayed in
Vietnam,
even when it was insane. Hey, that’s nothing new. You see,
I’ve got this uncanny sense of déjà vu.
Dr. Mel Waldman, a licensed New York State psychologist and a candidate in Psychoanalysis at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies (CMPS), is also a poet, writer, artist, and singer/songwriter. His stories have appeared in numerous literary reviews and commercial magazines including Happy, Sweet Annie Press, Children, Churches and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, New Thought Journal, The Brooklyn Literary Review, Hardboiled, Hardboiled Detective, Detective Story Magazine, Espionage, and The Saint. He is a past winner of the literary Gradiva Award in Psychoanalysis and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is currently working on a mystery novel inspired by Freud’s case studies. Who Killed the Heartbreak Kid?, a mystery novel, was published by iUniverse in February 2006. It can be purchased at www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/, www.bn.com, www.amazon.com, and other online and local bookstores. Recently, his poems appeared online in The Jerusalem Post. Dark Soul of the Millennium, a collection of plays and poetry, will be published by World Audience, Inc. in 2007.