I have been writing poetry most of my life for my personal insight gained by "making passion technical" in the words of Robert Frost. That reflection magnifies the multiple aspects and facets of all experiences, including peace and war:
Dessert Storm Redeux
© Edward C. Marshall
Roses arc Red.
Violets are blue.
So are the wounds of soldiers, too;
Even those without a clue.
Bravely flung across the desert sands,
They'll eat their fill of excrement
vomited from their missing guts,
And then move on,
Their fatal foolsteps in the sands of time,
Blown beneath the desert storms--
Disappearing in timely soldiers' cadence
As they pulse their ebbing, flowing blood
Upon the sands-of temporality.
Roses are red and violets arc blue.
Even on caskets and body bags, too.
Draped with flags and tears and dirt
deep beneath the green, green grass
—at home.
OUR OLD TREE HORSE IS DEAD
Right outside my classroom window in an asbestos-shingled, World War II military barracks building converted to classrooms for our rural school, when I was a school kid in the second through fourth grades in Hargill, Texas, there stood an ancient mesquite tree. Our Mexican-American school mates who called us "Yanquis" and who we called "greasers," in our mutually thoughtless innocence, teased us with their claim that the Spanish etchings weathered and worn almost illegible along its diagonal rearing trunk were navigation aids Santa Anna had carved there when he went north to attack the Alamo--although the date inscribed still looks more like 1835 than 1836 to me.
At Hargill, the tropical delta ended and the great Southeast Texas desert plains began far south of San Antonio where Santa Anna besieged the Texans fighting gloriously for independence and futilely for their lives in the Alamo. Imaginative Mexican school mates could have carved that plaque in ages since to rub the noses of us Texans in their claims that this was Mexico despite Texas' and America's war victories. We were too innocent and guileless to imagine that.
That old tree was shaped like a rearing horse. Its back legs were two strong roots on which a trunk was rearing like a horse pawing at the western sky, its tail a swishing cluster of root tendrils trailing toward the morning sun, dirt worn away by tiny feet climbing to its back for centuries. The trunk had been bowed over by some Gulf hurricane before the shores receded and the delta of the Rio Grande Valley had grown tropical with orchards cutting down the winds. Just beyond the two foot wide by three foot long and deep "back" of our rearing horse, a stubby branch rose from the trunk just like a saddle horn from a pummel loved by little girls; it was no end of pain and embarrassment for horny little boys. Then what must once have been two westward reaching limbs now arched down like legs to pawing hocks and hoofs above the sand, like limbs startled by some rattlesnake or hooves striking at a puma pouncing from the prickly-pear. From the "shoulders" the trunk began to rise before being bowed over again into an arch by countless seasons of strong winds. On the arch they left a mane of bracken blown into a cloud of leaves and limbs and sweet mesquite beans--the steed's head lost in the mesquite chaparral.
Fall through Winter we chewed sweet mesquite beans as we "rode" in play, pretending the beans were our cowboy "chaws"--until one boy brought a wad of the real thing to our fourth grade class. That we chewed religiously in a ritual starting at recess and continued in our class where we sat next to the open windows, silently swinging screens out far enough to surreptitiously spit the juices at our old tree horse’s hoofs whenour teacher's back was turned. Then one day our teacher who hated our nasty boy habits closed and locked the class room windows where we were used to spitting at our tree horse's hoofs. She would not let us leave the room despite our single fingers pointing at the roof, a silly symbol for what we called "number one," more appropriate for boys than girls. We felt we were too big "men" to suffer our teacher’s humiliation by admitting what we were doing, although she clearly knew and was punishing us. I guess we wanted to prove we were men enough to put up with any woman's punishment. So she watched us slowly swallow chaws, the wads we were chewing at recess–until we all turned green (even dark brown wet-back boys).
We gushed barfing from the room. I plunged into the arms of a laughing Mr. Doyle, our Principal. The teacher had sent a girl out to call him to take us to his office for a lickin'. He laughed holding me by the arms facing him, tickled by my grimaced face fighting back the barf– until my gut erupted all over his fancy brown and white eyelet Florsheim shoes dancing like Gene Kelly's beneath my swooning eyes!
But in better days, more innocent, we could see our tree horse gallop into chaparral, disappearing in the thickets and the trees right before our eyes as we chased the bad guys off our range. Each recess we would race and scramble to be first of three or four seated on the old tree horse. There we played Roy Rogers on our Trigger, the Lone Ranger on our Silver, Gene Autry (who I later was to meet when my hero was fallen down drunk and I was working as a livestock showman at the Texas State Fair in Dallas) on Champ, or Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix (who my stepfather claimed he really knew), and a whole pantheon of other cowboy stars sprinkled on our silver screens on Saturday afternoons. We young Texans, 'though not our Mexican school mates, imagined taking Santa Anna's steed before he could go to the Alamo, saving Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie from their sad heroic stands.
Such heros lived on unhappily ever after in the wavering worlds of our make believe. We imagined them, if not heroes, condemned to ride the plateaus of a range without the peaks from which they had really risen to the heavens in our minds. We saw them stuck at home taking out the garbage and the trash, washing dishes, doing chores and cleaning others' dirt. Here we learned our sense of karma and of ethics: how to play fair and work as one on teams to overcome the bad guys of our dreams, to pass up "girlish" comforts for our quests.
I felt the trauma and chagrin upon returning over forty years later to see some school district employees' caterpillar tractor plowing over that old tree horse one afternoon, hauling off excised chunks of its beloved trunk in big dump trucks, and turning under all evidence of our heroic days to plant a smooth but grassy knoll to assassinate our dreams with signs that said, "Keep off the grass [this is not a place to play]!" I grabbed the old shield of Santa Ana carved into a slab of bark-less tree half plowed into the earth to keep for the future. I caressed it with my tears as I sat to write the following six years ago:
OUR OLD TREE HORSE
Our old tree horse is felled.
Our old tree horse is dead.
Tractor Cats pawed earth around
And laid our world bare.
Our old tree horse is gone.
Boy's laughter fades as well.
Boy's dreams recede
Into a gaping void of earth laid bare.
Glorious quests we conquered;
Evil schemes destroyed.
We rode into our childhood's sunsets
On that tree horse of dreams.
We charged upon our Silvers, Triggers--
Six guns flashing in the sun,
School boy cowboys playing Sheriff,
Drawing fast and watching villains run.
We fought for truth and justice
Against all odds and foes:
We fought for Davy Crockett and the Alamo;
All evils we opposed.
We fought for all the fairness
We fought for in our games.
We fought for truth and justice
And our American Dreams.
Big Cats have now uprooted
All our childish glee.
Tonka trucks, grown heavy with new reality,
Have dumped on our all our dreams.
We're left with worlds to play in
Laid bare of certainty.
We're left to fight the good fight
Against new two-faced foes.
I'm left to fight the good fight
Against new two-faced foes
Who order trees up-ended
And Cats to paw the earth,
Who order dreams uprooted
And our dreams disposed.
Our old tree horse is dead.
Our old tree horse is gone.
But all the dreams that linger,
I'm sure we'll carry on.
We're left to fight for fairness
For all in all their games.
We'll fight for truth and justice
And our American Dreams.
--Edromar [forever]
| Our Old Tree Horse | Dessert Storm Redeux | My Last "Rites of Spring" |
| My Epitaph | 5 | 6 |
| 7 | 8 | 9 |
