Away from Any Uniform

During the war when I needed to cry

I would drive to the nearest airport

and watch the soldier sons and some

daughters come home or say good-bye.

In the common privacy of the terminal

they were free to weep in the company

of strangers. Before the war it took

going to a movie in which something went

wrong between a father and his son

for me to feel my throat tighten and my

eyes well up. The only time I saw my father

cry was when his father died and too much

had gone wrong between them for him

: to want to fly back and bury that war.

I don't think the families minded me

watching or even knew their tears would

start mine flowing. In their eyes I was

another loved one waiting for his to come

back or leave. Now with us only half at war

I've had to learn to cry away from any

uniform or family that isn't mine.

When a plane drones overhead trailing

the tearless smoke of its jet stream

and my son, who's seen enough of war

in play and on the news to know some sons

go away and die, looks up, I let him see

this tear he can take back to his wounded sky.

HAVING WATCHED "THE DAY AFTER"

Half the nation watched the end

of the world on television, as if

the country could watch and then crawl

back to a natural night's sleep.

Before air time the big worry was who

would sponsor this broadcast, whether

children of a certain age should be kept

from watching, not be alone, and have

someone to talk with afterwards.

Seeing Lawrence, Kansas, incinerated,

we were to think of our home towns,

and when the mother of the farm family

kept making beds as the silos nearby

puked out their warheads, we were to

recall our mothers leveling

fresh sheets and blankets. A few

weeks after the blast with everyone

puking and losing their hair,

we could have imagined they were being

treated for cancer and that, too,

would have been true. Afterwards,

when the docu-drama ghost writers thought

they had made us feel too much,

government and ex-government officials

were marched out to cool down

what we witnessed, by explaining their

theory of peace through strength.

All our lives in this Age, we have heard

someone else's version of our lives.

If we had let them, they would have felt

for us, as the screen faded to