Nobody Gets Off the Bus: The Viet Nam Generation Big Book Volume 5 Number 1-4 March 1994

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Poetry by Stephen Hidalgo

The Threat of Force

(Bosnia, April 1993)

Not the time
to let yourself
be driven mad
by atrocities
you wanted
a peaceful world
do you think
this is all
you will see
there will be more
the children always
the children hurt most
in our gut
their torn limbs
in our eyes their tears
their restlessness
"attention deficit"--whose?
abandonment consumes
the mystery of being
a child

The sun wakes

on the new hills

the war dawn

born

again in new hearts

a generation of perplexity

as the angles

of corners that

have ceased to be

call new turnings

out of smoky sunlight

there should be a phrase

to sum up all

but there will not be

not tomorrow

Who has said
it must be this way
who has not said
it must be otherwise
it must be that
we have all said
how it must
but must not be

How this world is

a child we

will all leave

surrounded by echoes

of her mind's refusal

of echoes of gunfire

as she turns

to see another

morning

born out of that yesterday

that will not be turned

into a past we can learn

When will the garden break out
after the sounds destruction makes
have flattened themselves against hills
under a darkening horizon just becoming
aware that there are and always have been
(hushed) stars and...

Good Night

"When will peace break out?"
The summer dusk of your television screen
clips the wit of a journalist.
We who remember Vietnam
hear with a difference "peace"
the word and inwardly some
barren hillswept terrain
grows white stumps
of defoliated trees the memory
of what once was rainforest.
We bombed for "Peace"
poisoned and starved,
mauled maimed mutilated
killed for "Peace."
Democrat and Republican
Johnson and Nixon
Adlai Stevenson and J. Edgar Hoover
told us we must fight for "Peace."
Not figuratively nor spiritually
morally diplomatically
culturally theoretically
verbally nor aesthetically.
Who believes we must kill for peace?
In his ears the sound of bombs
parables the growth of "civilization."
Who believes peace will "break out"?
The worm who eats his way through
the burial ground and is
afraid there really will be a light
at the end of the tunnel.

Stephen Hidalgo, English Department, University of Notre Dame