Sherry Chandler

Walking Taft Highway

My uncle will be ninety if he lives
til June. Quiet, slow-spoken always, he
would, even in a room of laughing kin,
stare off into a distance no one my age
could see, as far as Okinawa, Guam,
somewhere in the South Pacific. Field
medic, stretcher bearer, all I knew
and all I asked about the photograph,
a smiling youth in uniform. He could
seat a chair with hickory bark, play
mail-order Resophonic steel guitar,
tape a wound tight as catgut stitches.

Lately he’s been wandering the highway
my elders call the Taft, an asphalt gouge
through his childhood. Hurt at logging
in his sixties, he walks with a stick.
I speed past him Sundays on my way
to Mother’s cake and cards. Along the hill
that marks the homeplace, on the stretch
beside the old McGibney farm, he stands
and stares, a sturdy old man leaning
on a piece of peeled black locust.

Once, in my Camelot-bedazzled youth,
I tried to give him PT 109.
He couldn’t make me see the way the old
dirt roadbed used to run or tell me why
he wouldn’t have those war tales as a gift.

This poem can be found in the current issue of Heartland Review and online at The Other Voices International Project.

I post it today to observe Veterans Day that was once called Armistice Day. Armistice Day is an international observance. Once upon a time, it celebrated peace, a treaty ending the first World War, signed on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour.

It was renamed Veterans Day after the second World War.

And so, irony can never die.

Today is also Kurt Vonnegut’s birthday.

Poo-tee-wheet.