(For Calvin Ramsey)

 

Tell me Colonel Sawbones,

 

did you ever see a new mother hold her son fresh;

from the battle of natural delivery;

 

where she places him to her full breast,

this emblem of love,

on her sweating chest;

 

you, Daddy Warbucks, so willing to

sacrifice other babies, for your lying

doctrines of truth, justice, and the

 

American way?

 

I say to you again,

 

did you ever see a new mother, as she watches her son

crawl for the first time?

 

screaming in delight as he and his new puppy

scamper close to your DMZ,

 

when the summertime brought the lightning

bugs for a silent communion with the eternal,

 

and her only child learned to eat

watermelon without swallowing the seeds,

 

And this mother knew,

 

it could not last beyond the next war cloud on the horizon;

her only son’s life was not worth the dog tags given him,

 

by all of us;

 

While tin sabers rattled,

and we invented enemies who did not look like us.

 

While pretty little Pentagon cheerleaders sang, “Hit em,

Hit em, Hit em harder, if artillery can’t do it, napalm
can!”

 

Tell me, Colonel Sawbones,

 

did you ever see a new mother as she watched her son came home

on silent weeping,

 

zipped up in a plastic body bag,

so shiny and final,

placed itself in front of her,

 

while she,

 

could not believe her eyes,

 

that her friends and neighbors had come like

a thief in the night

 

to take her only child away,

and ship him to a far off to a foreign

trench,

 

when they, themselves,

 

held barren wombs,

and pot bellied mouths,

 

for there is no cause so just,

no battle so, won,

no defeat, so singed,

 

that can replace this look,

 

in the newborn mother’s eye…