3 Poems by Tom Barlow
Fortress
Police sirens, all day the sirens, and the helicopters.
But not in our neighborhood, for we are barricaded
behind hundred-dollar bills stacked in a running bond
so high and tight we seldom bother to climb up and
look over the top to see the multitude outside pleading
for a bit of our wall. Surely, they must understand we
cannot share, for each portion is precious to us.
Just yesterday a young boy tried to scale the heights,
his fingers turning green from the ink as he rose. We
peppered him with nickels until he fell back into his
neighborhood. Everyone knows, for these people,
too much money is suicide.
When night falls, we pull the plug on electricity
for the neighborhoods outside our fortress, so we
can enjoy the stars. The mob gathers lightening bugs
in jars and holds them up to their faces so we can see
their want in the darkness, a darkness we are assured
is rife with rape and revolvers.
When we fail to respond, they spark a bonfire and
tear apart their own houses for firewood, until the
whole world outside our gates is aflame and the
heat warms the walls of our fortress so pleasantly
we can sleep with covers thrown aside
and our throats exposed.
Soldiers in Heaven
My old man lived his last years in a cloud of
cigarette smoke at the VFW hall, where old soldiers
stood rounds for one another and swapped stories
from World War II that no one else deserved to hear.
When he finally passed, we all hoped he rose to Heaven
to finally join his buddies who never made it
home from the battlefield, and by now there must be
an army of them up there—if there is an “up there.”
I wonder what Dad thought when he met his first Nazi there,
a man who prayed for Jesus’s forgiveness before he died,
as many soldiers do. Did the Old Man spit in his eye?
Do such things happen in God’s kingdom?
Or are old enemies enchanted, wings issued without
prejudice, and for those who fell to Earth from the
raking by a Messerschmidt, would Jesus now expect
them to buy the German pilot a round? I’ll bet Dad
is deeply conflicted about Paradise, if it is flush
with repentant Nazis, and God loves every one of them.
The Conchie
Patchen’s Collected Poems are
falling apart in my hands
he deserves a better death
his ghost is restive here
looking for the brave where
there are few, mostly we bystanders
watching the brownshirts
on television list the
books they will use
as kindling when the
time comes to burn those
who won’t kiss America.
It takes no courage to surf
on the tide of man when
he washes ashore in time
to feed on the hatch but
Patchen chose to starve
rather than chew up
the war children
succulent as they might be.
Twitter: @TomBarlow
Art by Kris Møklebust