It’s Day Twenty at NaPo where the prompt challenged me to write a poem that recounts a historical event.
Who Won?
Some people think we,
the USA,
won every battle during
the war in Viet Nam.
When attrition
and body count mean more
than maneuver and tactic,
When pawns are used as bait,
it’s chess, not real life.
Has the Army ever
told the truth
at the first chance given?
Classmate Tom, only 20 when drafted
and forced to war
died in the battle Xa Cam My,
near Saigon, Viet Nam,
on the 11th day of April 1966.
In-country only three weeks,
along with nearly 40 of his mates,
many others butchered and maimed
for life—they now can barely tell the story.
Was it the short artillery fire,
the cleverness of the Vietcong,
the foolishness of the USA officers?
Attack after attack by the VC brought more
American blood to earth and more death, until—
not so mercifully, Charley decided
to move on and to fight another day.
Nine years later Saigon fell
and Viet Nam became
one country and America’s
government found other things
to lie about.
Like in 1966 when Private Tom
and 35 virtual strangers died
in a forbidden foreign place
fighting for his Purple Heart
and Combat Infantry Badge.
Twenty years—where did they go?
Twenty years, and for what?
The tag on my shirt says
“Made in the Socialist
Republic of Viet Nam.”
Look both ways and wonder, will it ever be over?
Ignore the gaps at your own peril
so you can go back home in a metal box and declare victory,
or at least the promised “honorable peace.”
Note: While the reference in the poem to 20 years is the full duration of the US involvement in the Viet Nam conflict, it is also the age of my classmate when he was killed. The Battle of Xa Cam My was 58 years ago.
I write many poems. But I’m a lazy poet. Nowadays, I lean heavily on free verse, simply because it is easier.
My Day 4 NaPo (I pronounce, ‘nay-poe’) assignment was to write a triolet poem. It is a short, but strict form of eight lines, some repeating (verbatim), with a strict meter (iambic tetrameter) and rhyme scheme (ABaAabAB).
Except for NaPo, I would not have written this today. I seldom post on Tuesday. I confess to being inspired and influenced by the Bard’s Julius Caesar (3.1. 273), at least thematically. And yes, it did happen on a Tuesday. I changed my lines so as not to use exact lines from Shakespeare.
Love’s Rath
He said, “Let loose the dogs of war.”
Let Hell be sent for you, dear friend.
Caesar lies there! Dead on the floor!
He said, “Let lose the dog of war.”
Let gods avenge my angry scorn.
Unsheathe my sword, my soul to mend.
He said, “Let lose the dogs of war.”
Let Hell be sent for you, dear friend.
Look both ways.
Forgive some, not all.
Mind the gaps and pitfalls along the road to vengeance.
Click on the NaPo button to see the challenge and more poems (not all are on prompt).
I was at the self-checkout
scanning cans of stuff
searching for zucchini by weight
“a little help here”
for a friendly glitch.
It wants to know
How do I pay?
Card of course.
Push or tap?
The machine speaks advice:
“Please, take your bags.”
“Don’t forget your receipt.”
I wanted to tell the young, attractive,
and helpful (human) workers
about back in my day,
food on credit meant
the grocer or store kept your name
in a book, like a bookie,
then the annoying push-thingy machine and carbons
and you had to sign (press hard).
Do you want your carbons?
I would have bored them
with that not so long ago (true) bullshit.
So I took my stuff in plastic bags
and my receipt, and I smiled
and I thanked them by tagged name.
Two people I’d never set eyes on again.
Look both ways, AI (key word is artificial) is coming, scary or not.
Mind the gaps as some things (like legal pot) are still cash only,
but the drug dealers still allow limited time credit.
To balance my blogosphere life, I shall henceforth post my unprompted poems (or prose), called runes, on Mondays (formerly Thursday) so I can plan to post about every other day.
I claim King’s X for April because I hope to be working my way through 30 poems in 30 days with National (Global) Poetry Writing Month (napowrimo.net). I try to write to the daily prompts/assignments (it’s optional, I’m not that masochistic).
Thus, I shall post every day in April. When possible, I will combine or do a second post on Friday Fictioneers and Sammi’s Weekender. I will also try to read and comment on those challenges when I can.
Why Can’t We Be Friends?
What is the difference between
genocide, slavery, life,
and freedom?
It’s war. Granted. War is bad.
It’s literally hell on Earth.
Innocents and soldiers are killed.
War’s destruction is
without logic or proportion.
But pacifism is worse.
Evil cannot be appeased.
War is the symptom.
Humanity is the cause.
Hate is the disease.
Choose well but take a side.
Peace is a dream guarded
by nightmares. History proves
we always get the war we want.
There may be no winners in war,
but there are losers. I’d rather not.
Look both ways in the real world.
We must always fight for what is right.
Mind the gaps for seeds of hate and find the first casualty of war: truth.
Mistress Rochelle is on a twisted tantrum with tilted photos and pictures of leaning towers in the swamplands of Italy. If this photo, supplied by Anne Higa, inspires you to write a story on the straight and vertical, click on the Pisa Plaza picture to gondola over to the Maven of Purple (Rochelle) for the rules and regulations and how to post your square right over there.
Genre: Historical Fiction
Title: Holy Land for Pisa
Word Count: 100
***
“Drudo, tomorrow we sail for the Holy Land.”
“Good, Gotto. I’m sick of this damn tower. The world isn’t impressed. Every tower in town leans. Merda!”
“We’ll return with holy cargo from Calvary in Jerusalem for this Square of Miracles. Pisa will be famous. The excursion is funded with riches we took from Sicily.”
“We’ll never be known for our towers, Gotto. What bounty shall make us heroes?”
Gotto grinned. “Fifty-three shiploads of dirt.”
Drudo whines, “We battle for riches. We spend blood-won bounty on shiploads of dirt for a cemetery in a swamp. The tower is a better idea.”
Look both ways.
Historical truth need not make sense.
Mind the gaps in the foundations of towers.
Fame comes as much from failure as from success.
(It could have happened like that.)
Click on Superman straightening the tower to read other creative stories.
About one year after his birth, Galileo was baptized in the Pisa Baptistry of the Square of Miracles in 1565. And yes, it is historical fact. 53 shiploads of dirt from the Hill at Calvary in Jerusalem for the cemetery.
An army of one
Pompously preened
Proud Field Marshal for
Pearl of the Orient Seas
Baroque of dress
Greater than grace
Without humility
In defeat or dismissal
Pride over human life, yet
Human to the core, to the corps
Look both ways. History is prophecy.
Mind the gaps and seek the truth that may never be told.
Only one American has held the title of “Field Marshal.” Douglas MacArthur was appointed Field Marshal of the Army of the Philippines in 1936 when the island nation achieved a semi-independent status. MacArthur was to create an army for the fledgling country. He wore a special uniform, complete with a Field Marshal’s baton.
Many beautiful lyrical poems pine after the Philippines. Here, “Pearl of the Orient Seas” alludes to the phrase coined by Juan J. Delgado, a Spanish Jesuit missionary, in 1751, and to a poem by Jose Rizal (Mi ultimo adios), wherein he refers to the Philippines with that name.
Sounds and shots signal long, hot, dry August days
in El Paso, Texas, at Walmart,
where hateful hearts sang out in murderous joy.
Supreme white-hot hate hammered home death
& destruction to familias con niños.
Pathetic politicians paraded past.
Look both ways into the hearts of men.
Mind the gaps. If you see only good, look again.
***
Explicación: Next Monday, 3 August 2020, marks one year since 21-year-old gunman and homegrown Texan terrorist, Patrick Crusius walked into a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, with his legally purchased assault rifle and murdered thirteen Americans, eight Mexicans and one German, and randomly wounded 23 other innocents, including children.
Day 24 prompt: write a poem about a fruit. Where do we get the word for the color when we mix red and yellow?
A Norange by Another Name: Orange
What shall we call this yellow-red color?
Geoluhread was, but is not right. From China
came five centuries ago the answer, a round
citrus fruit. We shall call it orange, as is the fruit.
See the color, not persimmon, pumpkin, or tangerine
they are all orange. See textured shiny bright rind
hiding yellow seed, white albedo pulp and triangle
segments of juicy sweet meat for kings and queens.
Feel the firm round breasted textured shape,
softly, almost spongy, heavier than an apple
with a protruding nipple or navel or pedicel
from the flower of past blossoms mating.
Smell the fragrant fruit, the peel, the acceptance
of inviting sensual aroma used in fine perfumes
or arousing essential oils. Hold the orange
to your nose, near your lips, take her home.
Taste the tangy citrus flavor after peeled,
soft, bitter skin is removed, baring mixed taste
and aroma of sweet bliss, a robust exiting,
acidic-sweet flavor sliding into your mouth.
Hear the soft sound of bursting flavor,
for quiet wet eating, the soft thud when
dropped or tapped. Hear yourself masticate
briefly before swallowing treasured pleasure.
Look both ways for the common and the rare.
Mind the gaps, by any other shade, tone, or hue, and orange is still orange.
The fruit came before the color.
Writers are story tellers and researchers who dig up things after getting lost running down rabbit holes. Mix in some historian, astronomer, anthropologist, math stuff, superstition, and observation of nature and mankind, and we charge into where only rabbits need to go.
My rabbit hole excursion involved time and our (USA/European) calendar. I’ve written about this before – Christmas in August, for example. So, I did some lookin’ stuff up.
Our clock time is based on a 24-hour day, determined by one 360-degree axial rotation of the planet. Calendar time is determined by the full orbit of the earth around the sun which takes 365.256 days. The spinning and orbiting do not come out even, so we have that .256 of a day to deal with. Thus, leap year and February 29th. But there is also the problem of the .006. If you don’t compensate for that, over time, things get off. It has happened.
What gets off? Easter. We had to get a grip on Easter. The solution was a new calendar. Can you imagine?
Computing the exact date of Easter is called computus. Obtaining an accurate calendar was one time when science, or observed reality, served the needs of religion. The Church needed to fix this. So, they did. And with the help of more than one mad scientist.
No shit folks. They feckin’ lost Easta and had to hire a guy to find it!
From first being questioned in 325 AD at Nicaea, it took more than 1,200 years to fix – hundreds more to get the Greeks and Turks on board.
Most of the world now uses the Gregorian calendar named after Pope Gregory VIII. It eventually replaced the Julian calendar due to the timing error. That six thousandths of a day made a big mess. But even with all of that, since Eastern Orthodox and Protestants were suspicious of everything the Roman Catholic Church did, it took hundreds of years for the Gregorian calendar to be adopted. The Pope’s authority was limited.
To bring on the new calendar in 1582, and to get dates properly aligned, 4 October was followed by 15 October, thus jumping 11 days. For approximately 500 years the world had two calendars (really it was more) due to religious mistrust within Christianity.
It took almost 200 years (1752) before England made the leap and adjusted from 2 September to the 14th. Historical rumor claims there were riots in London. The last European countries to officially adopt the ‘new’ calendar were Greece and Turkey in the 1920s.
I counted 34 different calendars in use world-wide this year (2018 or MMXVIII). I learned that horology is the name for the scientific study by horologists of time and the making of time pieces/clocks. I could not find an equivalent for calendar experts.
Time (Earth’s rotation on its axis) and calendar, (Earth’s orbit of the Sun) are closely tied, but the sources of measurement are literally astronomically different. We have time zones and an international date line, but we have no such logical place to start or stop measurement of a year.
Lunar phases come into play and there are lunar calendars. The Church had to deal with them, because of Easter. I know the moon is a big deal (especially when full), but I am writing a one-day blog, not a book. Back to my point.
When does each year begin? Whenever we say it does. Tradition and Greg’s calendar say we begin each year on January first. Why? Who says so? A long-dead Pope?
Another confusion issue with the Gregorian calendar is that it was adopted proleptic, meaning that dates prior to its 1582 inception were extrapolated back in time. For a long time, dual calendar dating was common. Born on 5 October 1254? Not so fast. All that work for a good, accurate calendar.
So, what day it is may depend not only on what religion you are, but also on what sect or denomination of the religion you are, what culture you belong to, and what calendar you are using.
I am thinking of the words in the song by Chicago, with a similar title, “Does anybody really know what time it is…” Do we care what day it is? Yes.
Currently, a new year begins when we are about a week into the northern hemisphere winter. Nothing really ends or begins after 1 January, just some ‘back to’ stuff like school or work, the grind, the salt mines. It’s depressing.
The new year should begin the day after Labor Day, in early September. It just makes more sense. The first Tuesday after the first Monday (Labor Day) would be when the year begins with a four-day weekend. Just move Auld Lang Syne and all the other new year’s traditions back a few months. Football would be just beginning instead of ending. Summer would be almost done, instead of the beginnings of winter.
Fall is already the holiday season. It’s when school begins and life changes. What mo’ betta’ way to bring in the New Year?
Get rid of Columbus Day (or whatever you call it, apparently, he was a dick anyway) and make Halloween a day-off – a real holiday. Pass a law that every normal person must costume up and wear a mask. Instead of trick-or-treating, kids must sing songs for money or candy. Make the day after Halloween even more spooky. Maybe graveyard parties? Bring back Decoration Day but make it Night. Cool!
Vet’s Day is good, but can we move Thanksgiving to something other than a Thursday? If we go with Friday, we can have Black Saturday, Purple Sunday (or Advent day one), and Cyber Monday, as is.
Pass a law that every kid with a birthday in December must have a party (and a good one) in June or July. Require gifts for the first 6 years. Align all the other holidays with Christmas and Yule and make the celebrations 12 days long. Light candles. Or move Christmas to August, as I’ve previously suggested. Think of it. All those f**king Christmas decorations gone by Labor Day (another law).
After New Year’s Day, add Saint Patrick’s Day as a day-off federal holiday and call it Green Day. Require everyone to wear green, drink beer, and eat corned beef and cabbage. Have a similar day for every other immigrant ethnic group there is. If an Indigenous People’s Day is needed. I suggest May first. Wait. What day was Custer’s Last Stand? Make it late June and make Juneteenth a holiday, too.
End the school year on or before June first. Make summer work vacations 20 days long. Require everyone to travel and to spend money with friends and family and to have fun for two weeks. The other six days are for trip prep and recovery. It would be an economic stimulus of the happy kind.
We determine how this goes. We, the people, make the decisions. Pass a law making it illegal for elected government officials not to do what we want. Add a law that jails them if they do not do the things they promised to do while campaigning. Include all presidents. Demand a new government agency to determine and ensure that everyone has life (health), liberty (freedom to choose), and happiness (even if they must go to the dentist sometimes).
But first, let’s fix the damn calendar. Remember, Labor Day is the last day of the year and the following day begins the new year, no matter the date. It would dress up one Tuesday of the year for someone and she’d get all sorts of Happy New Year wishes. A lot could change, until the following Tuesday.
Have a good time. Does anyone know what day or time it is? Does anyone really care?
Look both ways regardless of the days or what culture says.
It is only 2018 if we say it is,
and there have been calendar gaps for as long as
this mote of dust has hung on a sunbeam.
The most inclusive happy holiday song ever. A fun watch, if yer up to it.
We were driving thru New Mexico to the Texas border. There’s no wall in that area, so we were free to pass where towns have names like Clovis, Muleshoe, Whiteface, Sundown, or Cotton Center. (Wall comment is humor.) Yolonda was driving when I first noticed sheets of white ice, which had formed on the north side of plants, tree limbs, and anything sticking up out of the ground.
Note wind turbine base in background.
While the scene was pretty, it looked like an ice storm had passed by. But the look wasn’t quite correct. As we continued, we drove into a thick fog, or some sort of cloud.
That part of America is a windy, unpleasant, high-n-dry desert. Why anything, much less cotton, grows there is a mystery to me. Cotton may have a history of controversy in America, but we all have items produced from cotton in our homes, and yer probably wearing some now. We were driving through the midst of cotton country, which extends from California thru the southern USA up to Virginia — once called “King Cotton” for a good economic reasons.
Cannot see the tops of the huge wind turbine electricity generators.
When I saw my first cotton field, I asked my friend to pull over. I jumped out of the car, crawled through the fence, and picked some raw cotton. I was 19 and a damn-yankee (Yolonda insists that’s one word) who’d never seen it growing. I knew little about cotton. Just that is was a textile and that it had a lot to do with The Civil War, The South, a guy named Eli Whitney, and his invention called a gin.
I understood that gin was an alcoholic drink, a card game, and was a word for to come up with, as in gin up. Later I learned what it had everything to do with cotton. A cotton gin is a machine that removes seeds, husks, and foreign material from cotton. Big machines are used to harvest it. Then, it’s taken to the nearest gin where all the seed stuff is removed. The seeds are used for cotton seed oil, but I don’t know if any other part of the plant is used for anything but compost.
Cotton fiber frozen to a bush.
As it turns out, the ginning of cotton is a messy process as it draws cotton fibers through a screen thingy to sift out the seeds and husks. A lot of stuff, especially cotton fiber, ends up floating in the air. It looks like clouds or fog. When I say a lot, I am talking majorly huge acres of cotton fiber floating all over the place. If you’re down wind of one of these gin things (as my daughter is), and allergic to atmospheric dust (as she seems to be), good luck.
After pulling off onto the wide shoulder of a Texas road, I walked about 30 yards to a brushy area for a closer look. I had no worries about critters like snakes, it was too brutally cold, as it often is in the unfriendly climate of the Texas Panhandle. I saw the white ice on branches, limbs, tree trunks, and rocks. Closer examination revealed clear ice covering something white. I broke off a small thin branch and split it open.
I looked around when I realized that I had solved the mystery. What appeared to be fog, was not. It was cold and humid with moisture in the air, but the “fog” was actually teeny bits of cotton fiber and seed husk floating in the air. Agricultural and mechanical air pollution was being generated by the harvesting and cleaning of cotton with gins. It’s all done right there before the product is sent off to further processing and turned into consumer products.
The combination of a north wind with the right atmospheric conditions of moisture and freezing temperatures combined with the white cotton fibers floating in the air. As this combination moved south, it hit upon north-facing vegetation and virtually anything sticking up into the air. As this mini ice storm passed over, it placed a layer of white cotton fiber on the limbs and branches, then covered it with water which froze to form a thin layer of ice. The result was a glistening combination that looked like frozen snow on one side of trees, even down the trunks. It was frozen air pollution.
Ice on cotton on wood.
Joanna Gains of the HGTV show Fixer Upper uses cotton plants for decoration. Here is a link if you want to see, or even buy some (Click here for link). I don’t cotton to the décor, myself.
And then there is the story of the lady who was upset with Hobby Lobby (or some such place) cuz she felt cotton for décor is racially offensive. Cotton did not cause slavery, but the invention of Whitney’s cotton gin did contribute to the significant expansion of the cotton industry and slavery during the first half of the 19th Century.
A little cotton pickin’ music for your listening pleasure (CCR doing a Leadbelly tune).
Be curious as you look both ways. Mind the gaps and watch for snakes when you stop to smell the roses
or admire nature’s work in concert with local farmers.
Our Literary Journey 