War Crayons

Dick and Jane, Sally and Spot, were real to me

            in a way that war was not.  Even Puff

was more compelling than the strange figure

            dressed in red, white, and blue,

his finger pointing directly at me, his effort

            to incriminate those who refused

to save their pennies for war bonds.

I don't remember our teacher talking of war

            or any of my friends sobbing

for lost fathers.  I looked at the maps in the paper

            not because they represented definite places

but because they were the first maps I had ever seen.

            My six-year-old life was a Puff world. flimsy,

no real meaning beyond its ball of yarn.

I wonder now how scared my young mother

            must have been when my dad

boarded the bus for Leavenworth, the draft

            looming like the Hindenburg

on all that they could see.  Unable to drive,

            living two hours from family.

she must have felt her world in its final shift.

And when he returned, rejected, color blind,

            what were the emotions I never saw?

Her relief riding his sense of incompletion,

            their combined guilt, fingered

by communal patriotism and disguised

            jealousy that they had been released

from  the journey they need not make.

I would move on to second grade fictions

            amid Spam sandwiches on homemade

dinner rolls, cars and trucks with ration letters,

            oblivious to scarcity, emotions

just below the surface in other homes. The war

            was an olive green blur  beyond

the rims of my unperceiving eyes, closed ears.

I had no idea that other children were herded

            on box cars, handled like the cattle we would

later own, steers we would ship to the packing

            house on a Sunday evening. for Monday

slaughter. Dresden, Aushwitz, Hiroshima were names

            I'd wait a decade to learn, a lifetime

to understand. Bodies to smoke. I'd never grasp.