Editor’s Note: In early August, the Talbot Spy will welcome acclaimed poet and Vietnam veteran W.D. Ehrhart for a special Spy Night at the Avalon. Often called the dean of Vietnam War poetry, Ehrhart has spent more than fifty years writing about war, family, nature, and the human experience. In advance of his visit, we are pleased to share a selection of his poems with our readers. Tickets can be purchased here.
Guns
Again we pass that field
green artillery piece squatting
by the Legion Post on Chelten Avenue,
its ugly little pointed snout
ranged against my daughter’s school.
“Did you ever use a gun
like that?” my daughter asks,
and I say, “No, but others did.
I used a smaller gun. A rifle.”
She knows I’ve been to war.
“That’s dumb,” she says,
and I say, “Yes,” and nod
because it was, and nod again
because she doesn’t know.
How do you tell a four-year-old
what steel can do to flesh?
How vivid do you dare to get?
How explain a world where men
kill other men deliberately
and call it love of country?
Just eighteen, I killed
a ten-year-old. I didn’t know.
He spins across the marketplace
all shattered chest, all eyes and arms.
Do I tell her that? Not yet,
though one day I will have
no choice except to tell her
or to send her into the world
wide-eyed and ignorant.
The boy spins across the years
till he lands in a heap
in another war in another place
where yet another generation
is rudely about to discover
what their fathers never told them.
by W. D. Ehrhart
