April 18, 2006: The Old Liberators, Robert Hedin
The Old Liberators
Robert Hedin
Of all the people in the mornings at the mall,
It’s the old liberators I like best,
Those veterans of the Bulge, Anzio, or Monte Cassino
I see lost in Automotive or back in Home Repair,
Bored among the paints and power tools.
Or the really old ones, the ones who are going fast,
Who keep dozing off in the little orchards
Of shade under the distant skylights.
All around, from one bright rack to another,
Their wives stride big as generals,
Their handbags bulging like ripe fruit.
They are almost all gone now,
And with them they are taking the flak
And fire storms, the names of the old bombing runs.
Each day a little more of their memory goes out,
Darkens the way a house darkens,
Its rooms quietly filling with evening,
Until nothing but the wind lifts the lace curtains,
The wind bearing through the empty rooms
The rich far off scent of gardens
Where just now, this morning,
Light is falling on the wild philodendrons.
[Like yesterday’s poem, this finds the poetic in something kind of
unusual — who knew old people at the mall could come off seeming
lovely? This poem makes me so sad: “They are almost all gone now.”
It’s just what T.S. Eliot is getting at in The Waste Land — time
moving forward is awful because you’re always losing something. Here,
it’s the veterans, and all their memories that soon won’t exist at
all.]
A YEAR AGO TODAY: Morning Song, Sylvia Plath
