Poetry in America

Memorial Day, 1972

53 MeMorial Day, 1972 In my Girl Scout tam and dress, I stood before my parents who seemed less pleased than I expected, silently struggling, I now guess, to say the right thing. Dad asked what his brother, working for peace in a Vietnamese village just south of the DMZ, would think of me, the young niece marching in uniform between convertibles of gentlemen vets from the Great War, the Good War, and Korea. I thought only of glittering batons tossed by majorettes in bathing suits and boots, the purr of polished fire trucks, the shine of tubas and trombones blown by sweaty, stern-faced boys, and the dignity my practiced, white-gloved wave might bestow upon the heavy, hair-sprayed ladies parked in lawn chairs along Race Street. Honoring the dead doesn’t have to mean you’re for war, I tried, veteran of fraternal conflict, desperate for glamour, for anything outside that town. You decide, Dad sighed, as if choice existed, as if a line had not already been set between us and the world of warriors. Firm, wordless. The silence I now hit, worn out by my own kid’s arguments. At noon, a fire siren sounded the start of that parade. My green dress and sash of badges already hung slack in the closet. ...