May 2022
Bio Note: I have written poetry through a succession of jobs—psychiatric caseworker, nursing home social worker, university engineering editor, the latter spanning more than 30 years—and a growing family of five children, six grandchildren, and my wife of 50 years with whom I live in Middleton, Wisconsin. During the peace-and-love '60s, a combination of factors forced me to examine critically the underpinnings of America, my role and obligations to it, and my moral obligations apart from my citizenship. As a consequence, I refused military service as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
Of Birthrights and Bombs
War: but what did we know,
my buddy and I, Aquarian naïfs
smoking Woodstock’s promise
as we tripped on our magic carpet
quest of a myth—
All we found were tickets
to dispute a foreign land.
He said yes. I said no.
He saw napalm burning kids.
I saw four die in Ohio.
America seethed.
Vietnam burned.
Guilty to survive,
he damned his tears
and soaked his pillow with blood.
Before the war, we frolicked,
heirs to spacious skies
and bountiful earth,
god-blessed kids bound
for an age of peace and love.
In war’s darkness
we found the stark truth
behind that sea-to-shining-sea
smiley face
we took to be America.
The Old CO
He grants us our point of view,
how sometimes you must take a stand,
resist oppression, fight the good fight.
But our friend is old and stubborn,
Vietnam never far from his mind.
There are wars, then there are WARS,
we reason: think Hitler and Pol Pot, Assad
and Putin. Evil must be checked.
“Yes,” he argues, “war after war after war.
We must find a better way.”
Then which ways? What hasn’t already
been tried in humanity’s warring past?
Provoking him to cite Gandhi or Merton,
Russell or Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris
for the twenty-third time.
He relents before the horrors of the Holocaust,
sighing like the weight of six million Jews
burdens his shoulders. “But what a caged bird
imagination is if armies, weapons and killing
are the best we can conceive.”
You’d make a damn poor president, we tease,
knowing the words please him. Ours is a battle
that must be fought: we, to ground his loftiness,
and he, challenging us to let that caged bird fly:
“We must find a better way.”
©2022 Darrell Petska
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