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| On January 1968, sighting the enemy, the door gunner aboard a Huey helicopter opens fire on a target below in the Mekong Delta. Image source: The History Channel |
Dear grieving family,
your father, son, brother, uncle
still screams in the heart of his killer
Was he fishing that day
or wiring mortars?
Doesn’t matter
our young, dumb helicopter pilot
was obeying orders when his
rat-a-tat-tat shattered his target
gripping his soul with a grief
that won’t untangle
fifty years later,
he trembles when telling the story
and your father, son, brother, uncle
lives again,
his dreams floating
in bloody water and we
want to go back
rewrite the day,
let him arrive home, happy
with fish for dinner
because our young dumb soldier
was looking over his other shoulder
and will get to grow old with simple,
ordinary, explainable
regrets.
Peg Quinn is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, mural and theatrical set painter, award winning quilter and art specialists at a private school in Santa Barbara, California.
