The Wounds: Then and Now

The Wounds: Then and Now

The Wound [1973]

Loosely swathed gauze
Lets a spot come through;
Where the blood seeps
Around your matted hair
Flies congregate in conference.

The rain swirls
Around your muddy boots,
Caught in a Hell’s hole
Of the jungle loam
Where the photographer found you,
Clicking several times,
Recording another victim
Of the war.

He sold you for a cover
For the magazines,
So that the world,
Like sympathetic dogs,
Might lick at the wound.

May 1973
----------------------------------------------
The Wound, 2008

Your death was sudden
As the crash against the night
Of the IED placed by the road,
Your body a moment before was
Theirs-- Son, Dearest, Daddy-- is
Now a thousand drops of blood,
splinters of bone/
Lost among the grains of pale sand.

You might as well have died
Like the civilians at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, blown to atomic bits
Where and when the WMD’s were for real.


There are no photographs now,
Where you are digitized and forgotten
By the government of the people,
by the people, for/
Now your number is as lost
as abandoned hope
At the gates of a too familiar hell.

August 2008


Steve Vinson

Posted over on Poets Against The War