The Wednesday before a Memorial Day
during the Vietnam War,
Sammie and Henry and Karen and Harriet,
the 4F’ they called themselves, a
“fucking fearsome fighting foursome,”
dreamed up a rally against LBJ’s tour
through the middle of the city,
handed out flyers on street corners,
nailed them to trees, shouted to students
before class, passersby at malls,
to form an awesome protest
They slashed the backs of posters
Henry stole from the campus store
with slogans in psychedelic script:
“No More War!”, “Peace Now!
“Bring Back! Little Buddy!”,
the fraternity clown drafted
for missing two semesters
due to lack of bread
And when the cavalcade rolled by them, standing alone,
fists in the air, the 4F’s chanted into megaphones
as LBJ waved his thick fingers at the cheering crowd,
hand over heart, hailing the red, white and blue,
proud of their country, proud of the boys
they watched dying on the evening news
“Damn,” the 4F’s later lamented
between classes in grad schools,
in offices high above working class stiffs
in start up homes slapped together
in gentrified zones,
“all that time in the hot sun and
Little Buddy still got himself
killed over there”
And mourned for the rest of their lives
the loss of those hours they sacrificed
scribbling on the cardboard signs
they trashed at the intersection
of 14th and South streets
that the sanitation department hauled
to the town dump the very next day