MOMENTS WITH YOUTH 

Monks in Training for War

Mark Krueger

Like many others, I have been thinking a lot about war, youth, and lost childhoods. Recently I brought out this poem, which I started a few years ago, and began to work on it. All my poems are works in progress. This one is based on memories of basic training in San Francisco during the Viet Nam war. I joined the reserves to avoid the draft. After basic training I went home to serve out my time on once a month weekends and summer camps while I worked as a child and youth care worker. The other kids, mostly poor kids, were sent to the jungles. I can still see some of their faces. I used to lay awake at night in the barracks and think about how we were being brainwashed, and how lucky I was to be going home. One night I got up and snuck out of the barracks and sat by the ocean contemplating swimming away. I remembered how as a boy I had swum “up north” in the warm lakes of Wisconsin.

A few of the kids had died from spinal meningitis. When they got sick someone would come in the barracks and take them away and we would never see them again. It was cold and damp, I remember, because they had to keep the windows open for circulation. The pacific sea breeze would flow over the covers. This all got me thinking about lost childhoods and experiences I have had since those days, and how in many ways little has changed.

I offer the poem as a small contribution to the effort to raise consciousness for peace.
 

1.

hands    bled     on rungs 
of overhead ladders

script    and discipline    fed in
pills   of deceit 

under the covers
shrapnelled ejaculations 
and shattered solitudes 

wait       for the quiet

2. 

Such injustice
to steal youth

into the longing 
and the sea 

Of Being Numerous

opposition kept afloat
in Oppen’s Tao stone 
full of holes
through which 
breath and water flow

3.

heads turn up
then down
then up again

submerged in the ripple
that stirs close to the mouth

beneath the branches
the spore is 
a clavichord of the tree
and the tree is lust

        words stolen
on the way to the 
spearman’s light

4.

a bullet hole
in   rivers
and canyons   of bark

a small lake    of white sap

look into it
touch 
the cold milk 

5. 

low crawlers
In the Zen of war

moving in        place 
of   shadow and light

words let go and reclaimed
let go and reclaimed


6

in the distance

Tres Orejas

Abiquu       San Francisco 

       red cliffs

parks        and oil fields

cows walking

in dry river beds


a hacienda

almost reachable

in the still  moonlight 


7.

dawn and       the staccato voices

of lingering night

the rat tat tat of machine guns

tears like mist     drying where 
shadows fall into 
the rising sun



8.

in the barracks of despair
the blood letting almost done

callused hands 
loosing bouyency 

the words grappling 
in the waves         repeated

9.

struggling for breath 

necks    stiff 

another glance 

at the lights from the night ships

on the watery windshields

of    distant dreams




“There are things we live among
And to see them
Is to know ourselves”

From George Oppen’s Of Being Numerous