NaPoWriMo Poem #28

Brandon
By Edward S. Gault

From the time he was five,
Brandon loved shooting guns.
His grandpa gave him his first set of pistols.
They came with caps and a sheriff’s badge.

He used to play shoot out with his friends.
His backyard was the O.K. Coral
He was the Sheriff, he had the badge
The pistols in theirs holsters
His grandpa gave him when he was five.

Later he would learn to hunt in the family’s fields
With a b.b. gun his grandpa had given him.
He shot coke cans off the fence most of the time.
His friends all joined him,
They were all too old for the O.K. Coral.

When he was fifteen- a young man now,
Too old for O.K. Coral, too good for Coke cans
His grandpa gave him his father’s shotgun
He could just about remember
Those dinners when he was five
-the Christmas he got the pistols.

There was honor coming down to him
Through his father’s shotgun.
He remembered those duck dinners,
-and how the grown ups would all talk
about a place called Saigon.
They talked about that a lot.
A little while later the duck dinners stopped.
He remembered the gun when he saw it.
-and his father cleaning it.
He like the sense of power
his Father’s gun gave him.
The power to decide what lived
-what died.
This is what he did
on the weekends and before school;
and the long summers;
Thanksgiving and winterbreaks,
-when he brought home the ducks.
Then he prepared them
The same way he had seen his father do it
As he listened to the guy on the radio talk about
Saigon and the Viet Cong.
He knew his father would be going back.

Brandon attended University in Baltimore
Joined the R.O.T.C.
He married his sweetheart Marcy.
On the way to their honeymoon in North Conway
Marcy turned the dial
To some station playing the Grateful Dead.
She had heard enough about Baghdad.

She didn’t tell him when he went,
that she was going to have a child.
She wanted him to be able to do
what he knew he had to do.
He stored the gun carefully away,
until he came back.

When he did come back,
and the honors were completed,
A gun salute given,
And they presented her with the flag
-all folded in a triangle.
She put it on the mantle.
One day she would show it to their boy, Ricky.
He would never see the gun.

Copyright©2009

Various Spectacles

The following are selected views of Spectacle Island, in Boston Harbor.

Visitors Picnic,
Then walk path to the top
-Spectacle Island.

Eager to please us,
She was a blazing whirlwind
-fetching here and there.

Mohawks dump king's tea,
Crates float in moonlit harbor
-hundreds watch from docks.

Morning after battle,
He came up from the hold to see
-star spangled banner.

On Boston Common,
Children look at ice sculptures
-watch fireworks explode.

One country marched in,
waving banners of freedom
-to protect its oil.

Chiseled Presidents
Look out on troubled nation
-their wisdom ignored.

Murphy's Haiku #30
Mitch went out to pool,
Noticed everyone staring
-looked down-forgot trunks!

One Single Impression: Spectacle

See also Forest River Creations

Coffee Bean #5

Item: Two independent news organizations have published studies stating that the Bush administration had lied hundreds of times in the period leading up to the Iraq War.

I am a registered Republican, but quite frankly I hope this will end the 28 year romance the American people have had with the G.O.P.( Yes, we had Clinton there in the the middle,but you could hardly call him a Democrat). We need more balance now, not only between the political parties themselves but between the branches of government: the executive branch needs to shed its power, the legislative branch needs to take more of a leadership role, and Judicial branch needs have more liberal judges(or be more centered). We also need to rethink the greed, bring the jobs back stateside, and rebuild the middle class. Oh yes! and by the way, we also need to bring the troops back from Iraq and give to them as much assistance medically and otherwise to successfully integrate back into their communities.

Coffee Bean #5

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

Albert Einstein, 1921

Currently the leadership of the U.S. needs to grow up and get over their need to spread "freedom" around the world. It is not for freedom that we are in this war with Iraq, but our own nationalism. Our form of freedom may not fit the Iraqi people, they need to find a form that fits their history and culture-to industrialize, modernize, and develop democracy without westernization in their own way, over time...their time. If it is something they create, it will be stronger when it does take hold.

A Haiku To End The The War In Iraq

Tyrants talk
As troops march across a border
Children cry many tears


Copyright 2007

Coffee Bean #3

"Materialists and madmen never have doubts"
-G.K. Chesterton

We had no doubts about going to Iraq then,
And we seem to have no doubts about going to war with Iran now.


Copyright 2007

Remembering Pope's Day

Today is the day that colonial Bostonians celebrated as Pope's day. A lot of People don't remember what Pope's Day was, partially because it is not the sort of history that is generally taught in high school, it is a mere footnote in the story of our republic. It was "celebrated" every November 5 to commemorate the arrest of Guy Fawkes in the act of blowing up the British Parliament in 1605. Eventually Fawkes and the conspirators were convicted and hanged for treason. For Protestant England November 5 became a day of Thanksgiving for being saved from Catholic Rule. Ironically the Puritans who did not ordinarily celebrate anniversaries or holidays like Christmas( no evidence that Jesus was born on the 25th of December) unless they were biblical, made an exception for Nov.5th, or what they called Guy Fawkes Day. At first the day was celebrated by huge bonfires-I have a tendency to picture these being in the town square, but more realistically the authorities probably would have insisted instead that the event take place just outside the town. Eventually the celebrations grew more elaborate.
By the 1760's Bostonians were constructing "Popes Day Carts". These looked a bit like our parade floats today.Each cart had the figure of the pope, and beside him the devil, and trailing behind them on a donkey was Joyce Jr (Fawke's executioner was George Joyce). Boston had two factions, the north end and south end gangs, that would each construct their own Cart. They would parade them toward the center of town, then try to capture the other side's Pope's Day cart. This involved fist fighting, supplemented with cudgels, knives, and broken bottles. In the 1950's
they called these kinds of fights "Rumbles", today we would call it gang warfare. When one side had finally won by capturing the other side's
cart, both sides would bring the carts down to the neck of Boston and have the traditional bonfire.
When I first read of this ghastly holiday in Hiller B. Zobel's The Boston Massacre, I was reminded of the Two Minute's Hate depicted in George Orwell's 1984.When the image of Immannuel Goldstein, the official state enemy, came on the telescreen, people would scream over his voice and even throw chairs and other nearby items about until the reassuring figure of Big Brother came on. As "far out" as this scene is, it did happen,
not only in Nazi Germany, Communist bloc countries, fascist Italy and Spain, but also much earlier in 18th Century Boston with Guy Fawkes/The Pope as the Immanuel Goldstein figure (Pope's Day was also called Guy Fawkes Day).
In 2003 when the Bush Administration was trying to get support for the present Iraq, France refused to send troops there, and encouraged us to solve the problem another way, through diplomacy. Of course the French could have been of great help to us in this capacity as they had more influence with Baghdad than we did, and could have maybe got Saddam to cooperate with U.N. inspection teams. But no, as usual, we didn't listen to the French-we didn't heed their advice about Indochina (Vietnam) either and consequently became "embedded" there for quite a long time.
Never mind that other countries also refused to send their troops to Iraq,
France for some reason was singled out for venom that went beyond just
criticism from Washington, boycotts were called for of everything French from wine to cheese-even going so far as to pour the wine into the streets.
Absurdly enough we had to go changing the names of things like french fries to "Freedom Fries." Then of course came the real hate, a shirt which read France Sucks and to top it off, there is a little beret
draped over the F. This shirt seems to have become enormously popular.
In 2005 I photographed a local store window which had not only the french shirt but others which vilified the New York Yankees. I guess when the bigots figure that they're no longer allowed to hate the Jews ,Blacks, Hispanics, and Catholics, there is always the French and the Yankees.

The above Photograph entitled Shirts in a Window is currently displayed at the J.P. Licks Coffee shop in Brigham Circle in Boston.

Copyright 2007