Gerald
McCarthy
Winter
Solstice 2004
(or The New War Dead)
A
flock of starlings
scuttle
on the rooftop
splashing
in pools of rainwater.
The
last leaves in the branches
of
the red maple tree.
Look,
my friend says
theres
a kind of dark
all
around us,
you
have to get used to it, sall.
Brickers
neighbor shot himself in his garage,
the
summer I turned eleven.
He
drove an old gray Plymouth,
a
car with a single headlight like a beak.
Birdman
of Church Street, we called him.
The
car was pulled in when the shot went off.
A
pistol, Tommy said, Smith & Wesson 38.
Once
in winter I cut the yards,
saw
him bent over his workbench-
the
trouble light overhead,
cigarette
smoke.
He saw
my shadow and looked up.
Now
December rain keeps falling
and
the news slips out.
The
dead come back.
A
line of graying birds
huddled
together in the rain.
278
War, Literature & the Arts
Pylon
----------- And the young ones?
-----------
In the coffins
----------------------------
-Miguel Hernandez
At
night, invisible
aluminum
boxes
slide
down steel rollers
out
of the belly of a plane.
Names
from a new wall
count
off a kind of cadence,
marking
time
no one
hears.
Trucks
wait to upload
their
cargo.
Shadows
edge the airstrip,
a
greasy rain begins to fall.
Gerald
McCarthys recent poetry appears in Hawaii
Pacific Review, The
North American Review, Italian
Americana and an on-line anthology, Enskyment.
He has twice been a Visiting Artist at The American Academy in Rome, and his books
include: War Story (1977), Shoetown (1992) and the
forthcoming The Light Has No Tongue.