STEALTHY BOMBERS MIGRATING TO VERMONT IN FALL 2019

by Tricia Knoll

A federal report on the noise impact of F-35 jets on the area surrounding the Burlington International Airport is delayed again. Noise exposure information due from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding the F-35A Lightning II stealth fighter jets was due in December, then February. Now, according to airport officials, the information will be publicly available—tentatively—next month. —Burlington Free Press, March 14, 2019

The cemetery and the dairy face off against each other
on the winter-potholed two-lane road that runs
between two towns that aren’t really very big.

The F-35s are coming to the most populated part
of the state with the politicians’ blessings. On those wings
hang jobs, a possibly spotty safety record, and cost over-runs

that bring the war machine to where
the cemetery and the dairy face each other
on a first warm spring day.  The flags

in the cemetery reflect winter tatter
and the pasture grass for the cows
is brown. Someone on the radio

states that the new planes are four times
louder than the F-15s that left town
on Saturday, but whose brain can multiply

sound and decibels well enough to imagine that?
Suspicious why the FAA hasn’t issued
those sound maps, where the four times

as loud will be suffered. One man half-heartedly
blames the government shut down. The kids
in the school haven’t had their exercises yet

for when the noise terrifies them. They are
busy having their regular old active-shooter
drills. Even when the pasture grass is brown

and the flags on the cemetery are winter torn.

Tricia Knoll lives directly in the flight path of the F35s that will be stationed at the Vermont Air National Guard. She is a poet who is very tired of war machines, bellicose wall builders and those who seek to jail young children. 

REST IN PEACEDEPENDING ON WHERE AND WHEN YOU FALL

by Tricia Knoll

“Mummies are a non-renewable resource” - the curator of the Mummies of the World exhibit in Portland, Oregon. Source: The Oregonian.

In Burlington, around Ethan Allen’s grave,
metal rifles fence him in side by side with plaques
honoring the Green Mountain boys.

But all is not well there in that boneyard.
Stern Vermont winters crack
the stones severing moth
from -er, a caretaker stacks
white marble pieces like poker chips.
In one photo, my shadow
looms at the top of the heap.

Or drape the caskets of the war dead
in flags, honor them off the planes
to the waiting hands of family,
palms cooled on steel. The rolls
of the dead renew themselves
in war, in genocide.

We say rest in peace
as if we mean it
and fight over the bones
the tribal first people
claim as Kennewick man.
Carry the eagle feather
where they walked.
There is no guaranteed right
to bury our dead.

Or, become an amateur
mummiologist,
view Germany’s collection
of preserved mummies collected
from all over the world
lost during World War II
but now on loan
to museums near you.
They are old, dried out,
they are the dead.
That woman who holds
two baby teeth, one in the palm
of each wrapped hand --

ask if she is at peace.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet whose poems have appeared in a variety of journals. She is neither anti-science or anti-education -- "but if these remains belonged to North American first people, she says, I do not believe they could be displayed in this way in this country."