Weaned on War

By Eugene Platt

Eugene Platt’s volume of Collected Poems provides the reader with an eloquent distillation of five decades of humor, heartache, history, and love. Whether writing about the simple pleasure of eating a Folly Beach hotdog or the profound permutations of the passage of time, Platt brings his world—and all of our worlds—alive. — Wesley Moore, English teacher (retired); author, Today, Oh Boy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005678715

Eugene Platt

Eugene Platt was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1939. After serving in the Army, he graduated from the University of South Carolina and earned a Diploma in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His poems have appeared in many literary publications and some have been choreographed. He has given over 100 public readings of his work and was invited to read in the inaugural Dublin Arts Festival in 1970. He wasthe first Poet Laureate of the Town of James Island and was Poet-in-Residence for public radio station WSCI. He lives in Charleston with his main muses: Montreal-born wife Judith, corgi Bess, and cats Finnegan and Maeve.

Book preview

It is a peculiar call for me, an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church and devoted follower of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, to be asked to pen a foreword for a compendium of poems titled Weaned on War. The destructive and painful realities spoken to in many of this book’s poems seem antithetical to what I strive to preach and teach on a daily basis. I have nevertheless accepted the gracious invitation to help introduce these poems because I believe they are reflective of the wonderful man who has ushered them into being over the course of his many decades of writing.

I first had the privilege of meeting Eugene Platt when I began my ministry as Rector of his beloved parish of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston in the summer of 2017. Since that initial meeting in the nave of our parish, I have come to know Eugene as a talented and thoughtful poet with a tender heart. Weaned on War offers the reader a rich variety of very nuanced poems marked by that same tender heart I have always seen while serving as his priest and pastor.

Eugene’s poems are, for me, like so many of the psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures in what they evoke from the reader. Far from celebrating or glorifying the wars that have marked his life, his poetry, while grounded in the realities of this world, feels prayerful, questioning, and introspective. In reading these poems, one not only gets a better sense of Eugene’s life and times but also of some of the spiritual wonderings that have clearly captivated him such as:

Where is God in the midst of war and conflict?

What might be the human response to unspeakable suffering and injustice?

What is a truly good life? and

What does it mean to find oneself at home in this transitory and fragile world?

Not unlike the liturgy of worship I lead every Sunday morning, Weaned on War offers the reader a kind of sacred voyage that might help one to engage with so many of these pressing questions that can lead us into a deeper relationship with both God and neighbor. It is for this reason and out of my deep and abiding respect for Eugene, that I heartily bid the reader into an encounter with the poems in this great compendium.

May God bless you, dear reader, as you make your journey through these works composed by the poet Eugene Platt.

Labor Day, 2022

The Reverend Dr. Adam J. Shoemaker, Rector

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in the City of Charleston

Preface

And ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars . . . .

For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom

against kingdom . . . . All these are the beginning of sorrows.

—Matthew 24:6-8 (KJV)

Weaned on War was originally conceived of as a shorter New and Selected Poems volume, not, as its subtitle indicates, The Collected Poems of Eugene Platt. But while walking my dog Bess one recent Sunday morning before heading off to church, I had an epiphany: The time was ripe for a definitive compendium. After all, I am 83 and, if not now, then when?

The title poem, together with several occasioned by the startling results of a DNA test in 2021, sounds a lot like my autobiography would sound. Indeed, my mindset has been informed in large part by having been born in 1939 and, therefore, weaned on World War II. Many of my childhood heroes were family: Uncle D.E., who survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and was promoted for quickly manning his assigned battle station; Uncle Frank, who steered naval landing craft full of anxious troops to hostile beaches; Cousin Joe, lost at sea when his destroyer was torpedoed in the murky North Atlantic; Uncle John, who may have seen the raising of our flag on Iwo Jima, and who, after the war, was resplendent in his U.S. Marines dress uniform; and my dad Paul, a machinist who worked dutifully, sometimes seven days a week, at the Charleston Navy Yard to keep the fleet afloat.

Beginning school in 1945, I was puzzled when my teacher corrected me for using the three-letter slang term for Japanese. Wasn’t Jap the word Uncle D.E. and everyone else had used during the war? Obviously, I had been too young to enlist and could only participate vicariously, continuing to do so long after the war had ended. Standing at a toilet to pee, for example, whenever I saw a discarded cigarette butt floating in the bowl, I pretended it was a Japanese battleship, the tiny shreds of tobacco its crew. As I strafed the ship, I relished watching it roll over, its hull splitting along the seams, and all those detestable enemy sailors spilling into the boiling sea. I was too patriotic, too immature, to realize those bits of tobacco represented fellow human beings with mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, spouses, sons and daughters, all of whom grieved the deaths of their loved ones as much as we grieved the deaths of ours.

Naturally, upon finishing high school, I enlisted in the army, volunteering for infantry. The following three years of service with the 11th Airborne and 24th Infantry Divisions are a source of continuing pride. That is true notwithstanding the fact that such service left me with a significant hearing loss. But I came home alive and, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, So it goes.

As an octogenarian, I remain proud of my time in uniform. On the other hand, I have become increasingly dismayed by my country’s propensity to engage in needless wars and by the woes they wreak on innocents. Some of these poems reflect that dismay. Damn, I must be a dichotomy.

Eugene Platt

July 2022

Contents

Weaned on War

How I Escaped the Holocaust

Deaths of a Soldier

A Passion Play

The Light of Life

The Fort Jackson Bugles

War Games

Three for Yevgeny

Preservation Society

Dresden’s Frauenkirche Weeps for Notre-Dame de Paris

ABOVE AND BEYOND

My Lai Meditation

In Nam I Woulda Fragged Him

Agony in Egypt—April 8, 1970

Message from a Father Who Died on D-Day

Dachau Duty Revisited

For Dag Hammarskjöld

Adam’s Lament

Folly Beach Hotdogs

Ashley River

Edisto Hours

Main Crops, South Carolina

Listen

Melontime

Eat Strawberries and Seize the Day

Grandfather

Musing at the Music Barn

Saturday Night Fare

Machinist

Hampton Park Revisited

Sign Language

Filial

My Father

Pennies from Heaven

To Bury a Stranger

Flight 227

The Greatest Man

Transition

Message at the Dentist’s

The American Way

Prayer on the Eve of My Father’s Funeral

The Last Ride

Breaking News

The Girl Across the Street

My First Wife

Contrition

Have Faith and Wait

Visitation Rights

Paean to a Girl in a Poetry Workshop

Eugene Argues with Reason after Meeting Grace

Carolina Catechism

A Touch

Lines for a Young Poet

Poets in Trees

A Poet Learns the New Math

Menu for a Poet’s Breakfast

At the Writers Conference

Going for the Gold Bug

Overdose

Celestial Figs

Psyching Out My Psychiatrist

Captain Ahab’s Ditty

Haiku of a Whale

Haiku for the Happily Married

Ahead of the Game

Nuda Veritas

Celestial Navigation

The Eagle Within

Sailplane Pilot’s Fantasy in Flight

Sometimes Little Boys Can See Further

Lenten Meditation

Ash Wednesday Meditation

Holy Saturday Headline

Prayer for a Pandemic

The Dogwood Blossoms Disregard Social Distancing

Folly Beach in the Age of Coronavirus

The Tornadoes Next Time

Ditty for Saint Patrick’s Day

Destination Dublin

Lucca

A November Night beside the Irish Sea

At Trinity College

To My Second Wife

Second Child

After Inniskeen

Rhetorical Questions for John Berryman

Charity

Famine

The Untied Kingdom

A Regal Swan on the River Shannon

Waiting for the Train at Ballybrophy Junction

Forbidden Fruit at Dublin Airport

Rendezvous in Reykjavik

In a Deserted Farmhouse

Californication

Evolution

My Catheter Ablation

An Inauguration Day Lunch

Quartet for an Unholy Southern City

Exile

Re-Doing the Charleston

Sunset Concert at the Custom House in Charleston

Pulsed Out

Carolina Sands

Carolina Sands Elegy

On the Beach

Wine, Wild Flowers, and West Virginia

Fantasy for a July Day at Killiney Bay

Irish Mist

Fly Now, Pay Later

To the Girl Who Misguided Me in Halifax

That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Tammy

Moment

Disquiet

The Last Tryst

Rendezvous in Raleigh

Passion and Ice

Carolina Rose

Remembering the Girl at the Party

The Rites of Thanksgiving

Outer Banks Explanation

Washington, D.C.

A Long Way from New Orleans

An Angel from South Africa

Summer Swimmer

September Poem

Winter Tree

To a Red-Haired Exorcist

A Loaf of Love

Weekend

Tribute to a Matriarch

Blue Robe

Boxing Day on Tobago

Upon Leaving Western Pennsylvania

Coffee and Solace

Praise God for Grits

Dinner Candles

Nomad

In the Land of Disenchantment

Run Silent, Run Deep

Final Decree

For a Lost Son

On Vacating a Condo in Reston, Virginia

A Pregnant Woman

Route 36

Rather than Olives

Slaughter of the Innocents

Solace on the Puget Sound

Love after the Flood

Perennial

Joy/La Joie

My Solemn Vow

Love Poem for a Dying Wife

Simple Words

A Widower’s Fifth September

A Widower’s Wistful Worship

Once upon a Time I Was Your Angel

A Clump of Cat

Menage a Quatre

Cooking with Gas

Hyphenated Happiness

Crying at the Krispy Kreme

Connubial Trash Talk

Walking Our Old Corgi

Our Cat Eschews the Evening News

In a Butcher Shop in Bushmills

Thank-You Note to My New Wife’s Late Husband

Table Talk

The Day I Killed My Cat

A Conclave of COVID-Conscious Cats

Valentine for a Cat Called Keats

The Good Vet

Where We Find Our Fathers

My Father the Philanderer

My Mother Stoned

Second Genesis

New Life

New Priorities

Mother’s Day

Two Years at Kitty Hawk

Sandbox

Summer Days with Daughter

Portrait of a Daughter

To a Second Granddaughter

To a New Son

The Words

Metaphors Be with You

A Somber Day in San Francisco

Coda

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Praise for Eugene Platt and His Collected Poetry

Also by Eugene Platt

About Revival Press

Weaned on War

Born in 1939, the fateful year the hateful

failed artist from Austria turned despot

ordered armored legions east and Poland fell

faster than the leaves of autumn in Hell,

I was weaned on World War II.

I grew up inspired by and wishing I’d

been one of the Greatest Generation.

Even so, as gung-ho as I would’ve been, filled

with outrage, fiercely if not fanatically patriotic,

I know I could’ve been killed instantly

in the Anzio, Iwo Jima, or Normandy landings,

or had my balls blown off in the Battle of the Bulge,

or torpedoed off Iceland in the murky North Atlantic,

kamikazied somewhere in the waste of the South Pacific

—and after eight bells given a quintessential burial at sea.

Conversely, I could’ve come home bedecked with medals

for having killed enough emissaries of the enemy

—some of them, perhaps, coerced into complicity,

but all pejoratively called in pre-PC days Japs, Krauts

—to leave me limping with PTSD forever.

How I Escaped the Holocaust

Until age 82 I never knew I was a half-Jew.

Until age 82 and seduced into producing

a vial of saliva for trendy DNA testing, truly,

I thought I was purely one of the Unchosen.

As a young American soldier

after World War II wound down,

I found myself stationed in Munich,

the beautiful capital of alpine Bavaria.

Due to my newly discovered ethnicity,

had I been born in that ancient city,

I might have died in nearby Dachau

or been box-carred to faraway Auschwitz

to slave away day after day after day,

subsisting on watery gruel or maggoty mush

until it was my turn to be gassed and burned