Today I wrote me last Vietnam poem,

fifteen years after the fact.

Those folk songs, those anti-war chants-

I couldn’t get rid of them.

I’d hear someone screaming,

shattered or shot;

I’d plan my revenge

for gung-ho colonels and academic fools.

But alone in a house

in the middle of February,

I only see a familiar room.

I can look out a window

into a brown and leafless wood

and know there’s an end

to anger and sorrow.

I guess you just retire it.

 

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