by Bill Nevins

Kabul Sunset Version II
Kabul Sunset — “Mourn Your Dead Now,
Land of the Free”

(As proud-robed mujahideen
Give wary thanks in bearded faces
To Allah in the ruins
Of Forward Operating Bases
Daubed in sad skull-graffiti boasts
Of long-departed Yanks
In shadows of rusting Russian tanks.)

I have heard or read wise poignant words.
They’ve sewn together my shifting drifting worlds.
Kipling, Shakespeare, John Prine, James Wright,
Lennon, Dylan, whatever gets me through the night

Larry Kirwan’s “Fallujah” song or Patrick Sky,

Diving into the wreck of the Iliad, the Tain,

With sweet Ocean Vuong or some haughty Irish bard

Hoping not to shatter,
I read old battle-poems for wary solace:
My own true minstrel-boy gone to war for so long.

Star-flecked American war-guidons above each letterhead:
“Rest assured, Sir, you are in our thoughts.”

I watched the Albuquerque sun rise

For him, as I feared he had no eyes.

That awful morning long ago.

I was a foolish dad, for he saw, I know.

Went mad a month then as I first wrote frantic lines —

“Dover Base” and other cries,
Bitter sighs.  I knew he was dead.
We’ve gone years now to these Coronavirus times —
“changed utterly” as old Yeats said.

Do old poets ever heal, as nations move on?
In Marigold-Sunset blaze of Sunday of the Beloved Dead.

When all holy red sun banners had finally set,
and the dark came to wrap our mortal souls,
Spanish prayers were said
and yes at peace we are, he and I
these many years of peace dropping slow
these years of a war that should have ended long ago

by Bill Nevins

Night-lights and lullabies.
Sweet dreams and flying machines.
We were never the heroes we dreamed,
We are merely the parents we could be.
Imperfect, we live on.
Under darkling or brightening skies,
We see what we see, we know what we know.
Those perfect young lie dead: daughter or son.
We see more young ones march again to the Somme.
We see craven old men pushing guns.
So many brave youth gather in the streets of Santiago, Chile,
And their eyes are shot out by police:
Vet, black-patched like buccaneers, still they march.
As Victor Jara, long thought dead, lives and still sings,
As Salvador Allende still sings, as Chilean jazzman
Quique Cruz triumphantly sings.
We cling to that last glimpse before death stings.
We cherish the fading sight of age, wearing gold star rings.
We don Kevlar and gas-masks, perhaps.
Black-light scopes.  Facebook personas.
Bomb belts.  Leather chaps.
We see war.  We see America sliding towards night.
We see.  As a blinded sniper might,
Raging against the failing light.
Yet, for all our griefs, old lullabies and sorrows,
Our amaranthine children dream bright tomorrows.
As the poet Neruda reminds us,
“Podrán cortar todas las flores, pern no podrán detener
la primavera.”

(“They will be able to cut all the flowers, but they will not be able to stop the spring.”)

by Eric Forsbergh

The Swiss provide it.

Civil servants measure out
powder in a glassine pack.

A clean shooting gallery.  A chaise.
A nurse to check the riddled pulse.
Not cut with talc, glass dust,
or powdered rust.

Vomit, and the high intensifies.

The state’s the dealer now, so
fewer are coerced to start the trip.
Fewer far.

Yet once exposed, pleasure genes erupt
in crimson yellow purple blossoms
along tight stalks, hollyhocks of DNA,
then a slow wilt
into brownish pulps
at rehab intake:
assist you not to nod at lunch,
set a time for bed,
give you a TV, a toilet,
two tablets of an anti-drug.

Emptier now, treatment centers
erect fewer Babels of billable hours,
investors taking note.
Hieronymus Bosch was right.
Voyeurs eagerly seek the naked, pierced.

Without fresh flesh, Zurich gargoyles
scratch their famished guts,
thumb-lock their Glocks, scrape
their claws along the chapel gutters,
wolfing down their young.

by Emily H. Axelrod

We looped a rope
over a sturdy branch
one late fall day,
and swung high over the hill
above the sprawling hospital
where inpatients paced
on porches caged in wire.
A young man watched us
every afternoon,
joking in a loud voice
through the trees.
When he stopped appearing
we wondered where he had gone,
as we had all fallen
just a little bit in love.