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.