Arlington
    (for Terry Ponick)
    by Arthur Mortensen

Processions wind the lanes between the markers.
One pauses underneath a tree.
Gardens of Stone, the veteran bearers call them,
With names that we can barely see.

We see an end under a small, white cross
A terrible marker of non-being.
Three shots ring out, the echo next of taps,
But there are other ways of seeing.

This training accident that took a life,
A fierce collision in the sky,
Prepared the witnesses for their own missions,
That in the war they might not die.

Processions wind the lanes between the markers.
One now departs a shading tree.
Gardens of Stone, the veteran bearers call them,
The names belong to you and me.

Michael Moore Gets His Academy Award
    by Arthur Mortensen

Master of memory and little else,
The lardish actor cons another part,
Feeling the moment ripe for an opinion,
Though afterwards it smells more like a fart.

 An Embedded Sergeant Regards The Press
   Converging On His Squad’s Position
    by Arthur Mortensen

Here come the chatter kids, a band of clones
Awash in words of childish fright and shock.
They’re bred in tanks, and graduate at ten
To join our world as smooth adults.  And yet,
Confronted with the view outside a womb
Constructed by a media engineer,
Their first and best response remains to cry,
The way a puppy whines confronted by
The need to shit.  Though trained in theory
They have no wit; their educated voices,
Their full and well-groomed hair, their well-trimmed nails,
Their perfect teeth are absent claw and tooth.
For truth, they grasp at fantasies and lies
The way an infant mouths a dangling tit.

Standing On The Sidelines
    Watching All The Kids Go By
    by Arthur Mortensen

They’re cheering as a rocket finds its mark,
Those oddly clustered children now Marines.
A father could have warned them that a shell
Might kill them all, the way they huddled there,
A painting from the Civil War, so brave,
So giddily naïve.  But I can see
A young man’s face already hollow, eyes
That look out to an enemy, not me;
The dirt is thick upon his face and neck.
He hasn’t thought about a girl in days;
He’s taken quite a distance from a friend
He knows -- too soon -- can disappear, a smear
Beside a sand-strewn, desert pockmark, gone.
I’m sure he wonders why we urged him on

Why They Went West
    by Arthur Mortensen

Who raises up these thugs to plague our children,
Who have to chase them down, risk life and limb
Securing everything we’d promised them
By risking their own lives?  “There is no peace,”
A lesson they’ve now learned, which we’d denied,
Sipping a cocktail on a painted deck above
A lawn gone brown for lack of water, flowers
Late frost has nipped, speaking so easily
About the cost our lives had borne for them.
“What shit,” some G.I. like a growing son
Exclaims, his M-16 erupting, love
What he affords to those who keep him whole,
His link to prior generations split,
A pioneer embarking in his wagon.