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Contributor: Gary Jacobson || Poem Categories

Been 35 Years country as flag
Been 35 years since I rode the beast
Where ravishing war upon body and soul did feast
Yet I still can taste its quiet...
Smell the incessant noise I cast a distressed eye at
Still to this day humping, worrying, waiting, watching
Constantly gazing back there with foul intent staring.
We old warriors now are but bystanders at the parade
Past provocateurs, forever lost in war's amoral charade.

Still I wonder what we've learned in this heinous crusade
Venturing out again and again to face a contentious blade
Riding in pious right's patriotic brigade
Constantly out of place, still stepping out of rhyme
In nonconformity out of step with the time
Wherein does violent America's character incurably abide
Constantly remembering a trip back to the venal dark side.
Sent to a nation its rights to d�bride.

Veterans still pose concern for the nation's politic polity
Patriotism betimes providing thoughts mercenary
Provoking right or left, war and peace deciding
Wrong or right evoking
Perturbing anxieties constantly tapping
War's past memory still brings on fearing
Constant cacophonies in minds always clamoring
Anxiously fretting about what's happening.

I constantly feel strange at the unease...
Spawned 35 years ago across the seas
Seeds planted long ago mid summer's killing breeze.
Won't someone this boy's disquiet appease?
Rest from war's clamors is all I ask; please
Cure me from war's unholy disease.
To stomp terra I think oft
Stop the world, I want to get off.
By Gary Jacobson
Copyright 2005
Listed June 12, 2010

About Author... In 1966-67, Gary Jacobson served with B Co 2nd/7th 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam as a combat infantryman and is the recipient of the Purple Heart.

Gary, who resides in Idaho writes stories he hopes are never forgotten, perhaps compelled by a Vietnamese legend that says, "All poets are full of silver threads that rise inside them as the moon grows large." So Gary says he writes because "It is that these silver threads are words poking at me � I must let them out. I must! I write for my brothers who cannot bear to talk of what they've seen and to educate those who haven't the foggiest idea about the effect that the horrors of war have on boys-next-door."

Visit Gary Jacobson's site for more information

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