Soapbox

Greening

It was in that time of green,
The time of opening,
When the earth is frantic with life
And children are frantic with thoughts of summer vacation;
When the soft green days pass,
Each a little longer and warmer than the one before.

Something new was in the air that year.
Beneath the talk of swimming lessons and summer sandals
And the smell of the lilacs by the back door
Was the sharper scent of unease around me,
And words that I knew,
But didn’t fully understand:
Protests…war…Vietnam.

I knew Vietnam
As a world of grainy black and white images
Brought by Mr. Cronkite to our dinner table each night.
“In Vietnam today, 23 Americans lost their lives.”
And please pass the bread.

The television showed soldiers in Vietnam
And helicopters, hovering like angry insects,
Flattening fields of tall grass
With their breath.
I knew Vietnam as a place of guns and mud
Where they loaded black bags into those helicopters.

But that grim, colorless place
Surely had no connection to my world
Of yellow dandelions
And eating ice cream on the back porch
By the lilac bush.

Summer was coming at last,
But the war was coming home.

“In Ohio today
4 Americans lost their lives”
These few souls seemed to turn the world upside down
In a way that the dozens misplaced yesterday had not.
Daddy stayed home from work
Because the college was closed,
And another word hung acrid in the air:
Riot.
The students were rioting for Kent State.

Tear-gas drifted on the night air
Mixing with the scent of lilacs.
Friends under our porchlight
Driven from their house
Because the war had come to our town.

Suddenly there were soldiers on our streets.
They looked bigger than the ones on TV.
Their boots were polished bright;
Their guns so very, very black
As they stood on guard
At the campus gates.

“Who are they guarding against?” I wondered.
“Us!” my older sister said,
And I felt my heart squeezed,
And every gun seemed pointed at me.

But when my little sister waved
As we passed in our station wagon
The soldiers at the gates waved back and smiled,
Looking, for a moment, like the laughing students
Who had been lounging on the grass the day before.

With one giant step,
“Mother May I?”
The war came 3000 miles closer
One green day in Ohio.
Families prepared to bury their dead
And a pink hair ribbon fluttered
From the car window
As we went to try on summer sandals.