Friday, March 20, 2009

The Truth of Vietnam

...the thing about remembering is that you don't forget (34).
Rain and slop and shrapnel, no where to run, and all they could do was worm down into slime and cover up and wait (148).
Grief, terror, love, longing...they had tangible weight (21).
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die (21).
His jaw was in his throat...
his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole...
the skin of his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips...(124)

War makes you a man; war makes you dead (80).
Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin' (76).
[People] did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know (143).
You don't know Nam (97).

1 comment:

Emma H said...

My poem is explaining how people during Vietnam did not understand the complex nature of the war. My poem shows the stress and death the men had to deal with and nobody cared or understood what they had went through. This shows that people do not understand things fully unless they experience them first hand.