The Spaniard's Salute

My mother's on her own
search now for her father
who died before her birth.
Her tactics, as always, are razors.
She forwards me a list
of his medals, says the Army
would be happy to get the
cloth-and-brass tokens
of bleeding blue bravado
in the mail right away.

Neither of us met the man
but somehow these pins
will mean something, so she thinks.
Their names are vague:
Good Conduct Medal
American Campaign Medal
World War II Victory Medal
Honorable Service Lapel Button, WWII

But was he the guy who would always bum smokes?
Did he listen when the riflemen ranted of home?
Would any honest Joe want him in his foxhole?
Those are the things that'd make me proud now.
Hitler blew his own head off. It took a Little Boy
and a Fat Man to beat the Japanese.
My grandfather knew nothing of winning wars alone.
He died and left a family to fight their own battles.

There's a portrait of him in her living room.
His tie's tucked in to his khaki dress blouse
between the second and third buttons down
from the top. The near-black hair of his pompadour
and thin mustache glisten from the yellowed canvas.
In his eyes there swells a sadness that his kin
know all too well. Perhaps he sensed his day would come
so early in that car crash. A taxi's back seat soaked with
blood tells the tale. What are the odds of a fatal wreck
in Manhattan where traffic rarely exceeds thirty?
What are the chances that a poor single immigrant mother
who never learned the language would raise her two sons
and third unborn daughter in spite of adversity
stacked to the ceilings of factories, commercial kitchens
and churches doling out bread and secondhand clothing?

Send me the ribbons for that, Uncle Sam.
Show me the certificate you've penned in her name.
Where is the placard, the mural, the bust?
A street in the capital named in her honor?
Instead she waits in line for a glorified madhouse bed
where rotting minds die as the pills preserve bodies.
That's the fate the true heros suffer.
That's what waits at the Thirty-ninth Line.

There are veterans of wars that waged on for decades
who silently sink to the depths they've desired:
Five feet down to a merciful grave on a hill
near a soldier who died in the Fifties.


Currently reading:
"The Gunslinger" by Stephen King.