Profession

We each have a date with death, they say.
And there’s no denying them, or death.
Yet before I leave this sometimes troubled,
often trifling, but ever wondrous, world,
I pledge myself to frame in verse
the majesty of your fair flesh,
the magic patent in your glance,
the power in a wisp of your silken hair.
I have seen such beauty there,
that words melt into sighs;
what little art I have, with frenzy’s filled
to build images with which to strike
against the blandness there is about me,
the blandness that I, too often, am about.
So when, from their fear of life, they curse me
as a subtle weaver of wicked words,
I’ll mock them with the sweet firmness
of your bold breasts, your thighs.
I’ll shame them with the bright silence
of your dark-as-sherry eyes.
I’ll chastise them with your charm,
your voice of honeyed spice,
the kiss that rises, roaring, from your heart;
with the gentle grace of your loving soul.
For I have seen such beauty there,
that all their pious ranting is but cant;
their trite morality, mere diversion
as they turn away while children die
to boost The Bottom Line,
or act out the myths of aging fools.

*          *          *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2011

A Quiet Hour

Sergeant Trung was a Canh Sat, a member of the South Vietnamese national police.  Most American GIs derisively called officers like him “White Mice”.  The police wore white uniform shirts, gray pants and gray caps with black leather visors; most of the police officers were of diminutive stature and seemed to most GIs to be scurrying about – thus the Americans’ sobriquet.

Trung had suavely conned me into meeting once a week with a group of his neighbors – men, women, and teenagers – to go over their English lessons and help them to improve their pronunciation.  It was an honorable exchange for his driving me around Saigon on the back of his Honda motorbike on our mutual days off.  It also allowed me to gain a better knowledge of and appreciation for Vietnamese culture and the nuances of the language.

The group met in the front garden of Trung’s house near Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon.  In the third week, after our review work was done for the evening, Mrs. Sieu came up to me.  She bowed slightly.

“Excuse me please, Mr. Vinh.  I like to invite you come visit my Buddha temple.  You come there and spend a quiet hour.  You join us sitting calm like Buddha.  Think about life.  Love.  Happiness.  Sadness.  Pain.  Death.”

She paused and smiled.  “You like my idea for you?”

“Yes.  Yes, Mrs. Sieu, I would like that very much.  But…”

The delight that transfixed her face at my Yes forestalled my giving her the reasons for not visiting the temple.  Her joy even smoothed out the wrinkles around her eyes, and at the corners of her mouth, making her appear almost young again.

She took a little slip of paper from the shallow pocket of her ao ba-ba, a blouse in the peasant style.

“I wrote down address for you.  Maybe you get Sergeant Trung take you to temple on his Hon-da.  You come next Thursday, five o’clock, okay?”

She placed the folded paper in my palm as she took my hand in both of hers.

Trung had moved near us, nodding and smiling.

“Don’t worry, anh Vinh.  I take you there by my Hon-da, for sure.”

I never made it to that quiet hour, for the next day the brigade command changed my assigned duties and my duty station, making it impossible for me to get to the temple that Thursday or others; it even became difficult to return very often to Trung’s front garden to tutor our group of eager students of English.

Two years later, I parked my taxi at the stand on 5^th Avenue and Washington Square.    I walked to the hot dog vendor’s cart for lunch as I’d done before on many other days that summer.  The late July sun was almost vengeful as it rippled its heat across the asphalt.  The Twin Towers, still under construction, rose in the distance through the shimmering heat.

As I stood savoring each greasy but tangy bite of the frankfurter smothered in onions and tomatoes, I noticed two people standing in front of the arch at the park’s entrance.  One woman.  One man.  They held signs with PEACE lettered neatly on stiff white cardboard.  They stood silently, motionless, unsmiling.  They were neatly dressed in blue jeans, and short-sleeved shirts.  They both had backpacks nestled at their feet like sleeping, strangely shaped black dogs.

Suddenly a man in a business suit crossed Waverly Place toward them, walked up to the woman and started heckling her, berating her.  She stood there, still, impassive, not replying to his taunts, not even looking at him.  Her eyes were focused on something in the distance.  I looked at her companion standing with his sign five feet from her.  He too was impassive, immobile.  He didn’t turn toward the heckler nor did he show any concern or emotion at all.

The woman’s lack of response enraged the heckler – and intrigued me.  The heckler’s voice got louder and louder.  His ranting against pinkos and peaceniks and un-American traitors became more incoherent.  I finished the last bit of my hotdog.

I made my decision.  I walked back quickly to the taxi and took my hack license from its holder on the dashboard.  I stuck it into the back pocket of my trousers.  I locked the taxi and strode toward the woman and the man in the suit.

“Give me that damn sign,” he was raving.

She stood there, still immobile, unflinching before his agitated hands and anger-flushed face.  She still grasped the sign proclaiming PEACE in large letters and in smaller ones “Quaker Action”, and “Silent Witness”.  Just as he reached for the sign, I slipped into the space between them, facing him.

“Now, you don’t want to do that.  That would be assault.  Come on, I’ll buy you lunch.”  I put my hand on the sleeve of his suit jacket.  He looked down at my hand and pushed it away.

“I had my lunch already!” he snapped.  He walked away swiftly, toward Broadway.

I turned and faced the undaunted woman.  She was about my age.

In a voice lowered as if I were in a holy place I said, “I’d like to stand here with you.  I’m a veteran.  It’s time for peace…”

She didn’t look at me.  I saw a slight movement of her lips, but she suppressed it.  I looked over to her companion.  Unlike her, he was looking at me obliquely without turning his head.  He nodded almost imperceptibly.

I took up my position midway between them.  His arm shot out from his sign, his hand holding out to me another sign that had been beneath the first.  I took the sign and held it before me, my elbows close in at my sides.

For a quiet hour, I stood there, thinking about life.  Love.  Happiness. Sadness. Pain.  Death.

Walking at dawn

like one come back from the dead,
a Lazarus of good cheer am I
at whose feet the shroud of rancor falls.
in the sun’s doorway I stand
blinded by life, its beauties, its horrors.
a bird greets me, then flies off and flies, flies…
I follow, learning again to see, to feel,
to think and then to sing.

*            *            *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2011

Warm as sunlight words (for Lan)

Years past, when first we met,
laughter was our bond;
the badinage of drinks and song,
and, only later, tears;
the anguish of the witty phrase,
the secret visions of our fears.
But now, years past, stripped of all illusion
we find our bond is ourselves.
Love given, love received;
the fierce delight of well-worn scars,
the wayward magic of each day,
the quiet certainty of stars.
Stark as clouds are these
warm-as-sunlight words.

*            *            *

(c) Gregory V Driscoll  2011

Of worthy and unworthy victims

Now that we’ve had the news presenters, commentators, and pundits tell us that Mr. Obama’s Tucson memorial speech was exquisite, masterful, level-headed and one of the best speeches ever delivered by a leader of a democratic empire since the age of Pericles– oh, pardon me, I just got carried away with all the wondrous rhetoric, and was deafened into mind-numbness by the mixed congratulatory chorus of sucking-up by the corporate media — that last part about democratic empire wasn’t anything that appeared (or will ever appear) in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post or National Review or on the airwaves of Fox News and the other corporate or public broadcasting networks.

It truly amazes me almost everyday how blind so many of us have become to the inconsistencies and contradictions that our so-called leaders – ‘managers’ is a much more accurate term nowadays – display for all to see and hear, without so much as a peep from the phalanxes of the over-paid and smarmy but beautifully coiffed ‘chattering class’.

Here we have the head of a vast military beast whose tentacles extend into some 170 countries across the globe, and that daily intimidates, threatens, detains, injures, or kills hundreds – including children – invoking the memory of a nine year old girl and using her innocence to mask once again the murderous actions and attitudes which our ‘democratic’ and imperial policies bring to innocent children and their parents in foreign lands.   The latter, as Noam Chomsky would point out, fall under the category of ‘unworthy victims’, while nine-year old Christina Taylor Green, and the others murdered and wounded in Tucson, fall under the category of ‘worthy victims.’

What especially irritated me about the pResident’s use of this little girl’s character and memory was this passage:

I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.  All of us – we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations .

This from a person during whose very first year in office, and taking only Afghanistan, 131 children were killed as the result of NATO forces’ airstrikes and another 22 children had their lives ended during night searches by forces acting in our name.

I doubt if little Christina or my grandchildren would include killing children among their expectations of us.  Nor would they imagine our democracy to be good with the blood of Afghani, Pakistani, Iraqi and so many other foreign children rising in a tide that will soon result in our being despised by all the world.

So, the pResident can have his rhetoric, and can gloat at having successfully pulled his poll numbers up a few points, maybe even hit upon the new theme for his next campaign.

I much prefer reading the speech at the link below, given by Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1967, and for which the same ‘democratic’ press and news networks which praise Mr. Obama excoriated and vilified Dr. King.  He was murdered exactly a year later.

To this day, this speech is rarely re-issued by our print media, nor the audio feed heard on our airwaves – with good reason, too.  For it flies in the face of all the self-congratulatory pabulum and self-deceptive speechifying from LBJ, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger through Ronald Reagan and Bush I on to Mr. Obama’s John-the-Baptist, Bill Clinton, to Bush II, and now the present Pericles.

Link to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 Riverside Church Speech