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      April 17, 2018Eyes Wide OpenSam Hamill

      The little olive-skinned girl
      peered up at me
      from the photograph
       
      with her eyes wide open,
       
      deep brown beautiful eyes
      that bore silent witness
      to a grief as old as the ages.
       
      She was young,
      and very beautiful, as only
      the young can be,
      but within such beauty
      as bears calamity silently:
       
      because it has run out of tears.
       
      I closed the magazine and went
      outside to the wood pile
      and split a couple of logs, thinking,
      “Her fire is likely
      an open fire tonight,
      bright flames licking
      and waving
       
      like rising pennants in the breeze.”
      When I was a boy,
      I heard about the bloodshed
      in Korea, about the Red Army
      perched at our threshold,
      and the bombs
      that would annihilate our world
       
      forever.
       
      I got under my desk with the rest of the foolish world.
       
      In Okinawa, I wore the uniform
       
      and carried the weapon
      until my eyes began to open,
      until I choked
      on Marine Corps pride,
      until I came to realize
      just how willfully I had been blind.
       
      How much grief is a life?
      And what can be done unless
      we stand among the missing, among the murdered,
      the orphaned,
      our own armed children, and bear witness
       
      with our eyes wide open?
       
      When I was a child, frightened of the night
      and crying in my bed,
      my father told me a poem or sang,
       
      “Empty saddles in the o-l-d corral,
      where do they r-i-d-e tonight.”
       
      Homer thought the dead arrived
      into a field of asphodels.
      “Musashino,” near Tokyo, means
      “Musashi’s Plain,”
      the warrior’s way washed in blood.
       
      The war-songs are sung
      to the same old marching measures—
      oh, how we love to honor the dead.
       
      A world without war? Who but a child or a fool
      could imagine such a thing?
       
      Corporate leaders go to school
      on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
      “We all deplore it,” the President says,
      issuing bombing orders,
      “but God is on our side.”
       
      Which blood is Christian,
      which Muslim, Jew or Hindu?
       
      The beautiful girl with the beautiful sad eyes
      watches, but
      has not spoken. What can she
       
      possibly say?
      She carries the burden of finding
      another way.
       
      In her eyes, the ruins, the fear,
      the shoes that can’t be filled, hands
      that will never stroke her hair.
       
      But listen. And you will hear her small, soft, plaintive voice
      —it’s already there within you—
       
      a heartbeat, a whisper,
      a promise broken—
      if only you listen
       
      with your eyes wide open.
      Recording courtesy of Michael Ladd. First aired on Poetica Radio, June 23, 2007.

      from #25 - Summer 2006

      Sam Hamill

      “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.”

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