Lifetimes

By Quentin Baker

This is one of my poems and is an award-winning one.
The Guns of July
“I am the grass.Let me work.” — Carl Sandburg
The sheer cliffs above ocean roar Near Muir Beach Are dotted with gun emplacements, Cement and steel-plated half circles Buried deeply In the rocky sides. Giant, tall-stemmed yarrow and cowpen daisy, beach morning
glory and hedge mustard, blue pod lupine and
monkeyflower, silver phacelin
Push around them,
Burrow into the soil that the wind and rain have slowly
Deposited onto the reinforced roofs.

An occasional buzzard
Glides slowly above these empty warnests,
Searching, wondering. In the hollows of these relics, Civilians have tagged the back walls with names, With a heart and a cross or two, and with sly comments.
Forlorn after fifty empty years, these gray cement mouths speak not. No plaque, marker, or seashore sign reflects a purpose. Their builders and the young watchers who manned them do not testify.
The gulls ignore them
As do the brown pelicans who flap and then coast single file
but two feet above the blue waters below this day’s brilliant sky.
The young men who watched there, big-cased shells at the ready,
wake up gray, some white.
Not a few are dead.
This is good.
Off across the wide Pacific
Jungle tangle and roots have consumed the uniforms, the buried and unburied bones,
Joined together with the salt and seaspray, relentlesly
destroy the debris of war,
Save perhaps a forgotten bulldozer
Or one large wing from a downed fighter.
Poppies have flourished for eight decades in the
rich blood of Flanders
The sands of Normandy sparkle in the Channel sun.
Centuries hence earthquake and the relentless toiling waves will
crumble these Muir Beach bastions,
These warnests,
These constructs of man’s folly,
Man’s fear.
June, July 1994, May 1995

• Language: English
• Publisher: Quentin Baker
• Release date: Dec 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465794772

Quentin Baker

I am a retired high school English teacher, married with four grown children and eight grandchildren. I was born in Montana, attended university there, but moved to the SF Bay Area with my wife Jean in 1960. I have written a number of poems and used to attend cafe readings in SF. I have also written short stories, but abandoned an early novel in 1965. I edited a volume of poetry from various San Francisco writers, Poems from the Exit Café. I have also helped two friends self-publish their own books: Michael Hogan, Imperfect Geographies (poetry) and Dr. Mary B. Lane, Our Schools: Frontline for the 21st Century and Democratic Schools for Our Democracy.

Book preview

Lifetimes

Quentin Baker Copyright 2009

Smashwords Edition

Explorers

There once was a class of twelves

Whose words were elegant delves

Into futures and pasts

And splendors that last

Like love, music, and dreams,

Like rooms, faces, bodies, and screams

But more than all these,

Stop and think of this, please:

They were really exploring their selves.

Morning Child

Your bird-like cries break morning silence,

Your feet scurry loudly in the hall,

Messages to a new day

And to the world: I am.

Journey

The bell signals down;

Relentless engines pause,

Their roar turns soft,

almost silent,

And the drift begins,

This steady, barely perceptible movement

(At night there are no markers yet).

Downwards into the past

To the hellos-hugs-kisses

And wrinkled graying into white of sisters

Of my other self, my home self, met with oh such merry eyes.

The past reclaimed for a weekend, never quite satisfying,

But always necessary.

The bell signals up,

The engines roar, grating.

Cabin voices dither blunt life and death messages, unlistened,

The upward push begins, almost imperceptible

(There are few markers even in the light).

The present into which I come insists,

Always,

In having its way.

The Grave

for my student, Charles Nurisso

"Dear Buddy

We love you.

Edie & James"

Handwritten note placed with a small

American flag at the bottom of the Wall, nearest the 1959 corner.

The memorial...is dedicated to honor (those) who answered their country’s call.

National Park Service pamphlet

None of us, I think, have been told that it’s a grave,

Though Maya Ying Lin got it just right,

And we have been shown television and newspaper images of it for years,

And politicians of many stripes,

Some of them veterans and wearers of many hats,

Have droned on to us about its meaning.

Strange.

Yet there it is, plain as can be:

Come across the grass and through the trees of Constitution Gardens from the west:

Eight feet wide at the grass level,

One hundred fifty feet long on each side,

Set out like a carpenter’s square

That could easily be converted to a cross if another minor war would come.

Follow me down one slope

Where it sinks gradually to a perfect match to meet the slope from the other side:

We mirror ourselves in their shiny black granite names,

Descending in awe towards the inverted apex of mounting casualties

Embellished either by diamonds or crosses.

Why isn’t there a monument to the Korean War, Mr. Baker?

Joanne asked as only a fifteen year old can, clear-eyed, direct, innocent.

Other smaller kids, their private school blazers proclaiming 1873, were

taking rubbings of the dead.

I could not answer, the teacher me lost.

Joanne gave up and rejoined the larger group.

Help me now thumb through this worn directory,

The years have passed and I cannot catch the letters of his name.

I know he’s here, an M, perhaps an N;

Look for San Francisco, a thoughtful way to arrange the details.

I see only his tall frame, large-shoulders, round face and already a close crew cut

A strong voice as I recall, mostly cheerful but always serious

Probably a B, perhaps an A.

Look, here are the Mack boys, brothers;

I knew them not,

One’s name sits below the other:

One was not enough.

Martinez. More.

Shift your focus now,

Lincoln’s glorious, safer pantheon looms huge and white and Grecian off behind,

the great man brooding still on this America whose facts can gut our gung ho optimism.

Come back down with me again for one more look.

Our guide, a veteran volunteer who helps the National Park Service,

Points out," If you stand here, you see the left side of the Lincoln above the ground and the

right side in the Wall, see?"

Yes, thank you.

My student remains lost in that myriad of names,

Forgotten all these years until that very morning.

Perhaps he will emerge again on Armistice Day

And surely on those days that parents mark their children’s birth.

So strong and proud and sure, he was,

His ROTC uniform crisp and sharp,

His small medals brazen,

Our Cadet Colonel, O’Connell School’s first,

Pampered and pumped by Sergeant Adams,

A man who should have known better,

Having been to the Nam himself,

But whose good soldiering betrayed him and all those young men who listened,

Not to lies

But to genuine ignorance,

An ignorance that has lead our country more than once

Into an abyss paid in young men’s blood,

In vain indeed.

America the cosmic fool,

Seizing the Vietnamese opportunity to test all those sophisticated weapons

and devices and strategies

A partial list will do:

Agent Orange

Arclight

B52 Tactical Support

Walleye Rockets

Puff the Magic Dragon

Cluster Bombs

Attack Helicopters

See and Smell in the Dark Detectors

Napalm spread across the land in degrees more terrible than ever but never finding victory

Free Fire Zones

Search and Destroy

Pacification

A Secret Plan to End the War

And not once, in all those years, stopping really to ask why,

Or to doubt that we could never fail.

Leviathan flailing at the Gnat,

Blinded by one terrible obsession,

Feeding more cadets and still more into the quagmire¹ into the grinder

And