Warrior

I wasn’t always violence made flesh,
although, on my orders, six inch guns
launched shells from Inchon
ten miles inland over the coastal mountains
to the munition factories where havoc
was unleashed on the North Korean
war effort. Before the War I was a deck
officer on the battleship Colorado.
We had orders in the summer of ‘37
to do search and rescue
in the Line Islands south of Hawaii
where Earhart had gone missing
because her navigator, the idiot Fred
Noonan couldn’t find Howland Island
when his life depended on it.
I went up over Nikumaroro in one
of the recon planes but no luck,
sadly, and after a few days we gave up,
went back to liberty in Honolulu,
where Bing Crosby was all over the radio
with academy award winning Sweet Leilani,
which had somehow managed to beat
the Gershwin brothers with their gorgeous
and ironic “They Can’t Take That Away
From Me” . The memory of all that...
Four short years later my destroyer
was birthed next to Battleship Row
at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
That's when the violence began.