TORN

by Thomas R. Smith

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

Though our little lives go on, we’re aware
of a massive tearing—a fabric
we’d thought sturdy is being ripped by
unseen hands, cruel, immensely powerful.
This was not supposed to happen in our
country. The rent is pulling apart
the graves of those who died for a proud
ideal. My high school Memorial Days
in the band playing trombone at the cemetery
are torn down the middle, every
school morning that began with the Pledge
of Allegiance in shreds, and the history
book pages of our defeat of fascism
fallen to the ground like shotgunned birds.
Sit with it a moment and you’ll hear it
loud and close, a chainsaw biting into
our soul. Where are our old Scout masters,
our civics teachers who elevated
the virtues of our form of government? 
Where are the leaders we were taught to respect?
Where are the generals sworn to uphold
the Constitution while the demented
king wages war on his own people? Where
is Betsy Ross with her needle to drive
into the hole in our nation’s heart
and stitch back together this wounded cloth?

Thomas R. Smith’s recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press). He lives in western Wisconsin near the Kinnickinnic River.

WHERE’S HERSH?

by Devon Balwit

A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. —Philippe Arriès
 

I get out of bed and put on a costume 
of being a person, says his mom,
the number of days of his captivity taped to her bosom.
She speaks to anyone who’ll welcome 
her—President, talk show host, reporter. Numb
is not an option, not while her son might live. Come
home to us, she prays, her thumb
pressing her prayer book. She prays for Umm
Mohamed, Umm Sarah, Umm Ahmed as well. I can’t fathom
her loss, imagining my own son, who looks so like him,
stolen into captivity. Harm
has already come to Hersh, arm
blown off, 220 days and counting. The number
of dead in this war also multiplies, like the rubble. I watch gruesome
videos taken by an American-Palestinian doctor—hard to stomach—
ordinary people being overcome
by history. What can be done? שום דבר —shum
davar—it seems—nothing. But Rachel must keep her momentum.
This Memorial Day, let us insist, alongside her, upon Shalom.

Devon Balwit walks in all weather and has recently returned to life-drawing and cartooning. She edits for Asimov Press.

IN MEMORIAM DAY

by Michel Steven Krug

How do they know the real population of Minnesota, asked my daughter, as her older sister was within hours of an and-one moment. There are vital statistics kept, each birth and death are tracked to offset the changes. Deaths by IED, in schools, grocery stores, dance clubs, by gangster/zealot/misguides with ARs, by combat, depression, vengeance-disease or age. Thinking of my Aunt, with her new pacemaker, describing her day to her what’s-his-name son, because after dinner, the mind’s velocity wanes, as if a human comet falling back to earth. I visited my dad’s grave, saluting his WWII Airforce time, sure, but his greatest service as mentor to all. If he could see what the insurrectionists assert today in the name of patriotism, he’d re-enlist and ask for a D.C. assignment, thinking he could detox the paranormal hatred engendered against progressive democracy. If unsuccessful, he’d enter his “come on now” mode, demanding nothing less than reason, flinging treason into the infested sewer. It’s said we are coded.  His sense of equanimity/persuasion/reason/forceful compassion = soother of spirits. We each inherit a collection of such souls, all of the elements swirling within, like an alphabet of inclinations. With it do we promote peace, or reflexively look for sales, fitfully running from the best within? Memorial Day is indeed solemn, honoring passed down lives that survive as we ride the bear, the bull and the barrel.

Michel Steven Krug is a Minneapolis poet, fiction writer, former print journalist from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. He’s Managing Editor for Poets Reading the News (PRTN) literary magazine and litigates. His poems have appeared in Liquid Imagination, Blue Mountain Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Portside, The New Verse News, JMWW, Cagibi, Silver Blade, Crack the Spine, Dash, Mikrokosmos, North Dakota Quarterly, Eclectica, Writers Resist, Sheepshead, Mizmor Anthology, 2019, PRTN, Ginosko, Door Is A Jar, Raven's Perch, Main Street Rag, and Brooklyn Review. 

FINGERPRINTS

by Peter Witt

A mother in Black Creek, GA

drops her child off at school,

heads to the AR-15 assembly line

at Daniel Defense, where guns

coming off the assembly line

are packed by a father of three,

two in college, one still in high school.

A young woman, barely out

of high school processes online

orders for the killing machines

from gun stores across the U.S.,

trying not to think about if one

will end up in the hands of an 18

year old with murderous intent.

The owner of a Uvalde gun store

remembers legally selling the semi-

automatic weapon of mass destruction

to a young man who'd just turned 18,

then heading home for a birthday party

for his elementary school-aged niece.

A host of people, some with children,

have their fingerprints on the bullets

that made their way into the hands

of the Uvalde shooter, never realizing

they'd touched the bullets

that would shatter bones, blur faces

in a one-hour classroom rampage.

Somewhere in a peaceful office

a NRA publicist cranks out scripts

that pols and apologists can use

when the inevitable questions

about gun safety and control emerge,

he's yet to marry, have children,

doesn't think that children killed

in the sure to be future mass murders

could someday be his offspring.

In a conference room in Black Creek, GA,

the owner of the killing machine company

authorizes another 50K donation to the NRA,

a necessary cost of doing business,

profits from his company putting

his children through college.

Airforce One ferries the president and his wife

to yet another memorial gathering

where he will console parents whose

children never came home from school,

having only recently returned from

a similarly gathering of families

recovering from the hatred of a racist

who shot up a supermarket in their town.

At dinner tables around the country

families gather over traditional

Memorial Day hot dogs and hamburgers,

some with thoughts and prayers,

others to have discussions

about the need to own a gun,

protect their families, stave off

the murderous intent of someone

who purchased a gun made, shipped,

sold by fellow citizens, many with school

aged children—who firmly believe

the 2nd amendment is God's will

and plan to protect their children

from mayhem...

while somewhere in a bedroom

a young man, not yet 18, dreams of the day

he too can go the local gun store, purchase

an assault weapon made, shipped,

and sold by people with children,

so that he too can join the ranks

of the dead who've created

mayhem in a supposedly safe

classroom somewhere in the U.S.A.

Peter Witt lives in Texas, only a few hours away from Uvalde.  His work has appeared in The New Verse News, other online publications, and several print volumes.

ACHILLES IN MEMORIAM

by Janice D. Soderling

Graphic: Odysseus With Achilles In The Underworld. Attica red-figure vase, ca 480 B.C. When Odysseus visits the Underworld in The Odyssey, Achilles tells him, “Glorious Odysseus: don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.”

Eulogies are written by the living,

never by the dead,

who would probably have said

something quite different about life and giving.

Janice D. Soderling has often published at The New Verse News over the years.  Her most recent collections are War: Make that City Desolate and Rooms and Closets.

CLOSING THE BOOK ON GEORGE FELL

by Jimmy Pappas

Source: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund

Because of this I will weep and wail; I will go about barefoot and naked. I will howl like a jackal and moan like an owl. —Micah 1:8


1.

the page of a book
            can be a leaf
                        can be a butterfly wing

a book in a college dormitory
            on a Saturday night
                        with a young man studying

can be a starting line
            can be a point of departure
                        can be a loaded gun

2.

closing a book
            on a young man studying
                        can be a wormhole

to travel across
            the United States
                         to California

to Vietnam
            to Cambodia
                        to death

3.

I closed the book
on a young man
studying.

A bit of light air
grazed my cheek,
pushed me along.

The weight of air
at sea level is 14.7
pounds per square inch,

but what is
            the weight of air
                         with friendship?

4.

How does a young man studying plead?

Like this: Please, guys, I'm in trouble.
I'm gonna flunk out. I need to study.
Please let me do this.

How does a young man ignore his friend's plea?

Like this: Come on, Man. It's Saturday night.
We're going to party. You can study tomorrow.
There's always time.

5.

How do you close a book on a friend who is studying?
Do what I did: Just take the cover and flip it over.

6.

What makes a breeze?
            The warm air of friendship rises.
            The cold air of ignorance settles.

7.

The breeze moved us through an evening of drinking,
through a day of lounging around until thinking became
exhaustion, became another day of forgetting
until you left us and we forgot about what we did.

8.

pages of a book are many butterfly wings

9.

a chance encounter in a Greyhound bus station

you had the smell
            of fear and death

my friend told you not to go
but you were not one to stir a breeze

10.

On May 23rd, 1970, I saw a giant beetle
lying in a Saigon gutter on its back
struggling with its legs to turn over.

That evening I made love to my girl friend
while you were humping the boonies in Cambodia.

11.

I don't know what the breeze told me that night,
but I did know it would always be there at my back.

It whispered in my ear,

            remember
                        butterfly wings are leaves

            remember
                        leaves of a book are butterfly wings

Something happened. I didn't know what it was.

12.

When I learned about your death,
I could not understand one thing:

How could anyone
            have expected you
                        to kill another human?

13.

I wear my military jacket to get in the mood.
I find your name on the Wall.

I place my
            right knee
            on the ground
I place my
            left arm on
            my left knee

In my right hand I hold a piece of paper
with a handwritten couplet on it:

Over the distance of 10,000 miles I heard your cry
of how very very much you did not want to die.

I set the paper down at the base of the Wall.
I rested my forehead on my arms. I could not pray.
I wanted to cry, but I was unable to.
Instead, I looked up and stared at my reflection.
I placed two fingers against your name on the Wall.

Behind me, elementary school children on field trips
ran through the grass laughing. They have not yet learned
that the world they see today will not be the same world
tomorrow. A breeze will blow and carry them along.
Today they do not understand, tomorrow they will.
They will feel the breeze and understand the butterfly.

One young boy who hangs back,
            frightened
                        by all the noise,
reminds me of George Fell,
            who must have been
            the gentlest soldier
            who ever lived.

Jimmy Pappas served in South Vietnam during the war as an English instructor with South Vietnamese soldiers in helicopter training. At the same time, George Fell, his friend from college, died in the incursion into Cambodia on May 23, 1970. On that day, commanders announced the death of 190 American soldiers, 500 South Vietnamese soldiers, and 8,000 "enemy troops" in what was described as a "success." One day, several years before that, Jimmy and his friends closed a book on George while he was studying one Saturday night. George flunked out of school, and their paths went in different directions. To this day, George's college friends still love him.

DEATH IS NOT THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE

by j.lewis

although it puts what seems to be
a ragged stamp of finality
on unstarted and unfinished dreams

we mourn and we remember those
who took one for the team
for a vaguely defined cause
that slips our grasp like crude

"they died for our freedom"
is the standard line, and holds
true for very few of the conflicts
america has so willfully embraced

no one dares recite a line like this:
"they died to make a corporation richer"
or "we honor them with every tank of gas"
because to proclaim the emperor's nakedness
can get you a lot of hassle these days

and certainly, no one wants to ponder
the sacrifice of those left alive
the daily waking up dying
from loneliness, poverty, insecurity
children to carry on shoulders
already rounded with the weight
of grief, of love's candle snuffed

no, the ultimate sacrifice is not death
but living, pushing through the darkness
finding strength beyond self, and still
in spite of it all, believing
that this imperfect country
is the greatest place on earth

j.lewis has an irritating habit of asking about the collateral damage of war: the families of slain soldiers, and how they manage to keep on keeping on. His first collection of poetry, paired with his own photography, is available from Amazon.

MEMORIAL DAY COMES

by Howard Winn

Memorial Day is an American federal holiday. It honors those who have died while serving, but it also kicks starts the summer season and has become a weekend-long shopping extravaganza in the US. The holiday itself is the last Monday in May. So, this year, it is May 27, but most of the sales start the Friday before or even sooner. Nearly every retailer is holding a Memorial Day Weekend sale, where you can find great bargains on everything from grills and washers to TVs and laptops. Here are some of the best US deals and promotions we've spotted so far. —Pocket-lint, May 24, 2019

and our heroic leader having escaped
to Japan for a democratic or rather a
Republican weekend also thanks some
deity for his bone spurs that turned
him into the fake battle equivalent hero
while this weekend holiday sends the bargain
hunters to the holiday sales  and the thankful
condition of not needing to work on Monday
while lessor politicians hold events to honor
the "boys and the girls" who sacrificed so much
often including their lives in these old men's wars
which the children fight and die in so that
military cemeteries fill with accidental heroes
where the survivors some in their doddering age
can be remembered for a moment between the
shopping forays  which is what holidays are really for
in this current culture of money and power


Howard Winn publishes widely in literary journals such as the Hiram Poetry Review  and Valley Voices Journal. His novel has been published by Propertius Press.

ANOTHER MEMORIAL DAY

by Howard Winn

NORWALK, CT — While stationed in northeast India during World War II, Nick Samodel repaired cargo planes that hauled supplies over the towering Himalaya Mountains to allied soldiers fighting the Japanese. “We had five airbases close to the mountains,” said Samodel, who served as an aircraft mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Corps. “We had to change the engines and fix oil leaks — that was a big problem because at high altitudes the oil leaks out through the seals. It takes a lot of maintenance. We lost some planes. They found one 10 years ago on the side of a mountain.” On Monday, Samodel, 97, of Norwalk,  served as grand marshal in the 2018 Memorial Day Parade. —The Hour, May 26, 2018

Summer begins
and the ice cream shop
on the corner
opens for the season
while the families
gather on the corner
of Route 77 and Shore
Road to applaud
the earnest children
in the high school band
marching by led by the
grizzled World War II
survivor wearing his
old uniform which he
must preserve in a clothes
bag at the back of a closet
to remember once a year
the deaths in the Battle
of the Bulge or the killings
in the Western Pacific or
perhaps just service in Army
Supply in New Jersey where
heroes not quite lurked in view of
the sea and vacation beaches
and waited for discharge
while spending time being
entertained by the young
women volunteering for
time to party in the USO
so war could be forgotten
for a social moment to be
resurrected each year on
Memorial Day dedicated to
the waste of war even good ones
for patriotism is both the flaw
and the consequence of nationalism
even when reduced to jingoism


Howard Winn's novel Acropolis is published by Propertius Press. He has poems in the Pennsylvania Literary Journal and in Evening Street Magazine.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

by Robert Lee Whitmire

B-52 Vietnam

Empty sentiment confounds me,
irritates me, angers me if truth
be told, causes me to see red
but pretend it’s not red.
Today
is Memorial Day,
and I hear
‘Thank You for Your Service’,
empty words showering star-spangled
fireworks on endless rows of white
headstones marking graves
of fell-too-soon human beings.

Oh, say can you see the rockets' bright glare
As green and red tracers tattoo the air?

My ‘service’ was no service to anyone,
least of all the people for whom
I was supposed to be putting my life
at risk. I served hubris, avarice
and a white nation’s desire to beat
another nation of obdurate brown
people into bloody submission.

AKs, 16s, rip like shredding guitars as
Ribbons of cannon fire hurl from the stars

I was the lightning that set the house
on fire, that killed everyone inside,
then struck again and again
and again, killing  killing  killing.
I was a tool, an instrument, a useful
fool ‘serving’ people who shamelessly
drafted or coaxed me and mine to do
the unspeakable in service of the indefensible.

But you believe you are sincere and so you
thank me, and I say ‘You’re welcome’ even
though you are not welcome--but the alternative
is for me to explode in your face like one of those
‘Bouncing Betties’ Charlie used to salt
jungle paths. Or I might infect you like a
shit-tipped punji stick, or turn into a child
wired with C-4 running towards you while
I hide in the trees, finger on detonator.

And children of God entreat for their lives,
Himself in His Heaven is deaf to their cries. 

How does it serve you for me to kill
a child running to kill me and mine,
who is innocent of any crime yet must pay
for that innocence with its life?
How does it serve you for me to fly a B-52
over a landscape tens of thousands of feet
below, dropping stick after stick of
aerodynamic death, more bombs than
fell in all of the Second World War?
How does it serve you for me to kill
more than a million human beings
who did nothing  nothing  nothing
to deserve their fates?

Words, no matter how polite or currently
sincere, are not welcome from those who met
us half a century ago when we were young
and thought ‘finally, safe at home.’ Remember?
Did you spit? Curse? Call us baby killers?
Did you get on your draft-deferred high horse
and go sanctimonious all over our asses? Are
you one of those who now wants to send
more young people to fight and die and kill
more brown people because they won’t
see our truth?

Do not thank me for a service I did not render.

Moans of the dying fading slowly to dead:
Perpetual harmony of fire and of lead.

Robert Lee Whitmire is a Vietnam veteran, a husband, a socially progressive Unitarian, and a retired journalist, photographer, and social worker currently living in Maine and doting on his two small grandchildren.

MEMORIAL DAY

by William Cullen Jr.

Relative places flowers at one of the tombstones in the Los Angeles National Cemetery (then the Sawtelle Veterans Cemetery), where flags were posted for Memorial Day, 1940. This photo was published in the May 30, 1977 Los Angeles Times.

We walk down the rows
in a Civil War cemetery
like we were inspecting the troops
looking for one particularly
outstanding soldier
to pin a medal onto
instead of laying down flowers
in the pouring rain
on a great-great uncle whose name
escapes both us and his headstone.

William Cullen Jr. is a veteran and works at a social services non-profit in Brooklyn, NY. His poetry has appeared in *82Review, Canary, Gulf Stream, Right Hand Pointing, Spillway and Written River: A Journal of Eco-Poetics.

BEFORE MEMORIAL DAY

by James Penha

Large group of school children, with their teacher, standing in a town street, circa 1850s. Daguerreotype by an unknown photographer. Original in the Daguerreotypes Collection of the Library of Congress.

Which of these boys
in the back rows shucked
his suit for another uniform, packed
a Remington revolver 1858,
a Colt 1860,
or a Beaumont-Adams,
aimed a Pattern Enfield 1853 rifled musket,
a Springfield 1861,
or an M1841 Mississippi Rifle,
held high a Model 1832 foot Artillery Sword,
a Cutlass, or a Bowie knife,
before he was cranked
and grounded by a Gatling
or by J.D. Mill’s Coffee Mill Gun?

And how
many?

Which of their teachers?

Who among the girls cried
for the dead? Who
among the littler
boys?

Who craved
more?

James Penha edits TheNewVerse.News.

MEMORIAL DAY HAIKU

by Jimmy Pappas

Image source: Aftertaste

Memorial Day.
Eating burgers and fries. How
quickly we forget.


Jimmy Pappas is currently finishing a collection of poetry and stories about his experiences in the Vietnam War. He is an active member of the Poetry Society of NH. 

UNKNOWN SOLDIERS

by Paul Smith

Photography by David Jay from The Unknown Soldier. The Unknown Soldier is a series of large scale photographs of severely wounded young soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shot by photographer, David Jay, The Unknown Soldier documents the lives and stories of these young men upon their return home. The Unknown Soldier will culminate in a nationally traveling exhibition. A documentary is currently in production.

One cannot count how many
Unknown soldiers lie hidden
Nor their monuments
From Arlington to Vitkov Hill
To Shevchenko Park
There are more unknown soldiers
Than poetry slams
More unknown soldiers
Than tattoo parlors
More than churches
Their voices silenced
Their bones
White and intumescent
If they could talk
They’d say
‘You don’t know us
But we know you
And we know each other
The earth has joined us
By a seam of metamorphosed rock
Running from Verdun to Leningrad
And all the places in between
And outside of
A road map of futility
That you think leads to
War memorials and museums
But instead
Leads to cemeteries
You don’t visit
Where the known among us are
And to libraries full of books
You don’t read
Pages white and visceral
Inviolate and untouched

Paul Smith lives near Chicago.  He writes fiction & poetry.  He likes Hemingway, really likes Bukowski, the Rolling Stones, Beatles, Kinks and Slim Harpo.  He can play James Jamerson's bass solo for 'Home Cookin' by Junior Walker & the Allstars.

ON MEMORIAL DAY

by Gil Hoy

In the 1960s and 70s, DC Comics added a slug with the legend "Make War No More" to its war-story comic books. Source: Lady, That's My Skull

  Remember Tens
 of Thousands with
    fervent   frightened
prayers to
Pray       Ringing morning
bells to ring,  remember
Hundreds
    of Thousands with
  tender Flowers to
grow and
    nurture and
       Place on dry
   white bones
at the bottom
   of the Sky blue
watery Sea, remember
   Millions more souls
their Deaths finally
     justified
Heroic Happy
      dead   the
  Deathofdeath on
abandoned brutal
 Battlefields,
remember Memorial
Day
as America’s
    no more
 wars day


Gil Hoy studied poetry at Boston University, majoring in Philosophy and Political Science, and received an MA in Government from Georgetown University and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. Gil started writing his own poetry in February last year. His poems have been published most recently in The New Verse News, The Antarctica Journal, Third Wednesday, The Potomac, and The Zodiac Review.

MEMORIAL DAY MUSINGS

by George Salamon

This April 1865 photo shows the graves of Union soldiers who died at the Race Course prison camp in Charleston, which would later become Hampton Park. On May 1 of that year, former slaves gave the fallen a daylong funeral. Source: The Library of Congress via The Post and Courier

"Thus, the men and women we honor this Memorial Day are all those who have served this nation from its founding 239 years ago--since the Revolutionary War, we have lost 1,010,485 men and women in combat--as well as all those who defend us now against the threat of global terrorism." --Robert L. Dilenschneider, The Huffington Post, May 19, 2015

Once it was a  day of memory  to celebrate
The valiant art of war for just cause.
Today we march to bad music,
Civilization's enlightenment a puny seed
As the strong wipe out the weak and
The tyrants of the earth annihilate
Human work and sweat.
From desert in Africa to wheat field in Ukraine
The victors are not liberators
But bitter fear, hunger, fire and death.
         
On Memorial Days past did wise men speak to us?
Today we hear small men with big voices.
Men who know not what they are
And will not become what we know.


George Salamon taught German at several East Coast colleges, served as reporter on the St. Louis Business Journal and Sr. Editor for Defense Systems Review. He contributes regularly to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News.

MEMORIAL DAY 2014

by George Held

These (mostly) young men and women

Have fought and died for our freedom –

Nasty business, but someone has to do it –

So the least we can do is honor them

Once a year on Memorial Day, which,

Sadly, fell on May 31st, making

A floating holiday, so in our wisdom,

And eternal quest for convenience, we

Fixed it on the last Monday in May, this year

The 26th, leaving the 31st to end

The month on Saturday. So on the 26th

Let us march in or watch a parade

To honor our (mostly) young at-the-time-

Of-their-death veterans of our wars. Amen.

An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND: ISLA VISTA, 2014

by Marjorie Maddox

Aftermath. Photo by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times. “Seen through a bullet hole, IV Deli Mart owner Michael Hassan cleans up his store near UC Santa Barbara. A gunman fatally shot someone there.”

     “Authorities on Saturday afternoon removed three bodies from the apartment of the suspect in Friday night's shooting rampage that left seven people dead in Isla Vista, near UC Santa Barbara.” --LA Times, May 24, 2014

On this weekend for honoring the dead,
more dead, the radio blasting updates
between ballads, Beach Boys, the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic.”

Friday night post-graduation
in a college town not unlike ours,
sorrow drenched in war songs and the same
bloody questions we’ve mourned before,
each grief mounting beyond what we feared
possible, and possible again,
the way the radio keeps blaring
Sousa, worse-case-scenarios drumming still
worse long after we’ve tried
to turn the knob, silence the sound waves,
to finally and forever
disconnect the throbbing beat
between each patriotic wave
of the half-mast flag.


Director of Creative Writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox’s book,  Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock 2013), focuses on living in an unsafe world. In addition, she has a new ebook, Perpendicular As I ( Kindle version, Nook version, Kobo version).