Wallet poem #1
[Poem]
If memory serves, and I usually assume that it does (but am always open to being contradicted), I clipped this poem, one of several still idling aound in my wallet as mentioned below, from Harper’s Weekly in January or February of 1991 while, literally, and I know that ‘literally’ sounds misplaced but really, watching on CNN as Bush the Elder’s tanks rolled into Kuwait and I, as a (reasonably) young soldier myself quite personally was wondering if I would soon be, in person, rolling with them, the fact that my so-called studies of Arabic were still so woefully unfinished notwithstanding.
A year later, with a little more Arabic, after the tungsten/depleted uranium dust had more or less settled, I gently dredged this creaséd poem from a cloudy photo pouch intended for pictures of loved ones if any from a flattened wallet in some wrinkled desert BDUs in row 28 of some 747 leased by some airline to some branch of the U.S miliary to read it as we approached what turned out to be, I recall vividly, Rome, en route to Kuwait City, all of us, Rashid-al-Akbar and Rajul-al-Sharq and Tariq Lueck and myself with our stupid clattery M-16s jammed between our knees because god forbid our dumb guns, sorry, WEAPONS, go as checked luggage.
Oh, and you guys with the dumb guns between your knees? That’s a no smoking section. Yeah. Soldiers smoke. Why should they ever not?
By George Starbuck. From Grand Street, No. 36, a quarterly published in New York City. Starbuck, the author of eight books of poetry, live[d] in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
*This form is recommended for beginners. It is as simple as it looks. Fourteen characters to a line. Difficulty arises only when a footnote is required. Then the poet must contrive a thirteen-character line in place of the canonical fourteener, so as to leave room for the asterisk. Most poems in the form evade the difficulty by doing without footnotes, save for poems like this, which are designed to be put in textbooks.
