During the war, women hid messages
   inside white flowers
tucked in their hair. They crossed
   enemy lines, slipped the blossoms
into soldiers’ fists. What might
   have been a child’s crown
for her communion, an offering
   at a grave, might win the war.
The ovule, the style, the stigma—
   what seemed to unfurl overnight
took weeks, even years.
   Dream your hand plucks the bloom,
its widest petals like porcelain,
   and a halo of bees skims your arms.
Upon waking, walk to the docks,
   the bloom heavy behind your ear,
and breathe in its sweet persistence,
   its scent of sea salt and gutted fish.

Related Poems

In California During the Gulf War

Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,

certain airy white blossoms punctually
reappeared, and dense clusters of pale pink, dark pink—
a delicate abundance. They seemed

like guests arriving joyfully on the accustomed
festival day, unaware of the year's events, not perceiving
the sackcloth others were wearing.

To some of us, the dejected landscape consorted well
with our shame and bitterness. Skies ever-blue,
daily sunshine, disgusted us like smile-buttons.

Yet the blossoms, clinging to thin branches
more lightly than birds alert for flight,
lifted the sunken heart

even against its will.
                             But not
as symbols of hope: they were flimsy
as our resistance to the crimes committed

—again, again—in our name; and yes, they return,
year after year, and yes, they briefly shone with serene joy
over against the dark glare

of evil days. They are, and their presence
is quietness ineffable—and the bombings are, were,
no doubt will be; that quiet, that huge cacophany

simultaneous. No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.

The War After the War

                     for Greg Greger

I

Where were the neighbors? Out of town?
In my pajamas, I sat at my father's feet
in front of their squat, myopic television, 
the first in our neighborhood.

On a screen the size of a salad plate,
toy airplanes droned over quilted fields.
Bouquets of jellyfish fell: parachutes abloom,
gray toy soldiers drifting together, drifting apart— 

the way families do, but I didn't know that yet. 
I was six or seven. The tv was an aquarium: 
steely fish fell from the belly of a plane, 
then burst into flame when they hit bottom. 

A dollhouse surrendered a wall, the way such houses do. 
Furniture hung onto wallpaper for dear life. 
Down in the crumble of what had been a street, 
women tore brick from brick, filling a baby carriage. 


II

What was my young father, 
just a few years back from that war, 
looking for? The farm boy from Nebraska
he'd been before he'd seen Dachau? 

Next door, my brother and sister fought
the Battle of Bedtime, bath by bath. 
Next door, in the living room,
a two-tone cowboy lay where he fell,
too bowlegged to stand. Where was his horse?
And the Indian who'd come apart at the waist—
where were his legs to be found? 
A fireman, licorice-red from helmet to boot, 

a coil of white rope slung over his arm 
like a mint Lifesaver, tried to help. 
A few inches of ladder crawled under a cushion, 
looking for crumbs. Between the sag of couch 

and the slump of rocker, past a pickle-green soldier, 
a plastic foxhole, cocoa brown, dug itself
into the rug of no man's land 
and waited to trip my mother. 


III

Am I the oldest one here? In the theater, 
the air of expectation soured by mouse and mold— 
in the dark, a constellation of postage stamps:
the screens of cell phones glow.

And then we were in Algiers, we were in Marseille. 
On foot, we fell in behind a ragged file 
of North African infantry. Farther north 
than they'd ever been, we trudged

straight into the arms of the enemy: 
winter, 1944. Why did the French want to live in France, 
the youngest wondered while they hid, 
waiting capture by the cold. 

They relieved a dead German soldier
of greatcoat and boots. Village by muddy village,
they stole, shadow to shadow, trying to last 
until the Americans arrived— 

as if, just out of range of the lens,
the open trucks of my father's unit 
would rumble over the rutted horizon.
Good with a rifle, a farsighted farm boy

made company clerk because he'd learned to type
in high school—how young he would look, 
not half my age, and no one to tell him
he'll survive those months in Europe,

he'll be spared the Pacific by Hiroshima.
Fifty years from then, one evening, 
from the drawer where he kept 
the tv remote, next to his flint-knapping tools, 

he'd take out a small gray notebook 
and show his eldest daughter 
how, in pencil, in tiny hurried script,
he kept the names of those who died around him.

Firing Squad

On balconies, sunlight. On poplars, sunlight on our lips.
Today no one is shooting.
A girl cuts her hair with imaginary scissors—
the scissors in sunlight, her hair in sunlight.
Another girl steals a pair of shoes from a sleeping soldier, skewered with light.
As soldier wakes and looks at us looking at them
what do they see?
Tonight they shot fifty women at Lerna St.,
I sit down to write and tell you what I know:
a child learns the world by putting it in her mouth,
a girl becomes a woman and a woman, earth.
Body, they blame you for all things and they
seek in the body what does not live in the body.