UNFINISHED POEM ABOUT BABII YAR

UNFINISHED POEM ABOUT BABII YAR             © 1992, 2013

                                                                         by Dean Metcalf

There is a wall, with a door.

Most of us stay

and play

and work

and love

and fight

in the varied, rolling human turf

on this side of the wall.

But there is a place beyond.

I have approached that door,

seen it open,

looked through to the space beyond.

I wouldn't call it a room ‑ a desert maybe,

a soul‑searing place with no boundaries save

the laws of force.

I don't know everything

about what's beyond the wall ‑

but I know too much.

I leaned my hand against the door‑jamb.

It was hot to the touch.

A putrid smell wafted through the door.

How do I know that smell?

I recall pulling the halves of fuel drums

from beneath the seat of our outhouse at Chu Lai

with its panoramic view of the winding muddy Song Tra Bong,

dousing the piles of runny shit and toilet paper with diesel fuel

and lighting them, smelling the black roiling stench as it rose

into the monsoon sky.

I remember the smell of bamboo ignited by napalm,

hydrocarbon cousin to the exhaust fumes of the F4 Phantoms

that swooped low over us to lay it down before us

in tumbling silver obelisks.

I remember the rotten‑garbage smell of the fear‑sweat

in my own armpits, nights on sentry duty when

the bushes out in front of the bunker began

their creeping dance by flarelight, and

I hugged my machine gun

and my fragmentation grenades

and my double‑edged

     hand‑forged

     Randall‑made

     eight‑inch

     fighting knife as if they were mother, lover, home.

In the book there are many photos.

They are black and white, often grainy, ill‑focused,

as if the very glass of the lens

could not abide

the rhythms of the light that entered.

One photo shows a Latvian militiaman, supervised by German officers, rifle under his arm at a certain angle, guarding

a group of Jewish civilians

about to be shot

near Liepaja,

Latvia, in December, 1941.

The angle at which the soldier

holds his rifle, fourteen months before I was born and

a third of a world away, enters the lens to remain and remind me,

fifty years later, of a time when I looked down the barrel of my own M14 rifle, past the bare bayonet at its end, near the well

at Tho An, at a group of terrified Vietnamese women and children

and one old man who would not hide

his hatred.

In my life, I have played and loved and fought in the varied human terrain on this side of the wall, and

I have ventured close.

I was reading a book.

I returned from the basurero.

I scraped my boots.

It was not enough.

I must wash them,

in a tub,

under the spigot.

I must use a stiff brush.

Years after Vietnam, I had a dream.

I was alone.

They were after me: a battalion

 of gray‑uniformed SS, wearing that helmet,

hunting only me, bristling with automatic rifles,

hunting only me...

When I read a book,

the numbers of pistol shots in the book

enter my dreams. Then, in my dreams, my own hands hold

pistols my hands have held....

Come. We must back up to the doorway,

leave this place,

re‑enter the room of everyday life,

where human mercy, though it does not rule

(how would mercy rule?),

exists.

We must scrape our boots, you and I.

But that is not enough. There ‑ do you see? ‑

‑ there, on your boots too.

We'll wash our boots together,

in a tub,

under the spigot.

We'll use a stiff brush.

Molecules of childhoods fluttered into the air

above Babii Yar, multicolored butterflies

hovering above the gore. Mothers of daughters

and sons of mothers and fathers and grandfathers of

mothers of thousands of rollicking babies

screamed their screams into the air

above Babii Yar, where birds cupped their wings

and used these puffs of people's final breaths

to beat their wings against

and get away

from Babii Yar.

The molecules containing what remained

of 3,700 human lives

rose up in the sky over Babii Yar

and stayed there, forming,

to this day, nuclei of all raindrops

that have since fallen

in Earth's attempt

to leach the venom from

the poisoned holy soil

of Babii Yar.