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Science of Mind
Fall 2007   Vol. 24 #1
Fall 2007   Vol. 24 #1

Poems/Not Poems | Poetry Saves: War & Peace Poems

Bombardments / Maps and Guns

By Sean Mclain Brown

 
 

 

Bombardments

As a hedge against dying, our Commanding Officer issued everyone a red poker chip for good luck. I took two chips, as if the Eucharist and my C.O. a priest. We flew over the Nile and the temples of Luxor, finally crossing the Red Sea in a diamond formation. We were thirty minutes out from pickling our bombs when Anti-aircraft shells took out our right wing. Not even Moses could save us. And later, a Bedouin would find strewn across the desert: some boots, a medal, a map of Iraq, partially charred sketches of a flying fortress, a pocket watch stopped at 7:36 a.m., and two red poker chips.

 

 

Maps and Guns

Half the night up, spent as casings of brass, face it, we begin this way: there are no women, no satellite tv, no coca-cola, not even the sun, hidden as it is behind billowing black smoke. There is only an x on this map with an arrow pointing north to a line of scrimmage. This is simply a departure, demarcation of any sign of hope: caramel apples, wet grass, cotton candy, watermelons, laughter. We are year-worn, indrawn and compact. We are small, broken toys with maps and guns. I can remember my mother, I can’t imagine a father. I can’t write you because everything’s humming a new color, unfamiliar as childhood, a distant planet. I didn’t expect to escape. I had a blueprint, the life of a famous poet, picking cherries in June, fireworks over Penn’s Landing. Now I wake to the sleep of Lorca’s apples, walk through the meadow. This is just a place. These are just words flashing in the grass. To the north, there is the whine of distant jets and heavy bombardments. We must find a way between them.

 

 

From the Fall 2007 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 24, No. 1)
© 2007 Sean Mclain Brown

Topics

Poetry, Survival, War


Author

Sean Mclain Brown is a disabled former marine from the first Gulf War and is a member of the Veterans Writing Group led by Maxine Hong Kingston. He was the director of communications at Woodside Priory and taught writing at Western Connecticut State University. Now he is an editor at Military.com and a principal at Word Squared Consulting. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in EM, First Intensity, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, LUNA, Sentence, Sleeping Fish, Small Town, Paragraph, Potpourri, Transfer and 100 Best American Prose Poems (Firewheel Editions).

Author

Sean Mclain Brown is a disabled former marine from the first Gulf War and is a member of the Veterans Writing Group led by Maxine Hong Kingston. He was the director of communications at Woodside Priory and taught writing at Western Connecticut State University. Now he is an editor at Military.com and a principal at Word Squared Consulting. His poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in EM, First Intensity, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, LUNA, Sentence, Sleeping Fish, Small Town, Paragraph, Potpourri, Transfer and 100 Best American Prose Poems (Firewheel Editions).

 
 
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