Larry Schug reports he awoke again this morning with a heart beat and
air moving through his lungs. He worked on some poems, went to work and came
home and worked some more on the same poems. We assume he’s still breathing
and working.
The Neighborhood Mothers
Our WW II mothers hated us playing war,
threatened us with our fathers' belts
when we filled snowballs with stones
or stuck twigs in them
so they looked like land mines.
Our mothers got so angry
when we slashed at each other
with swords made of pine lathe,
or sling shot bbs and pebbles
over the heads of the rope-jumping Perrier girls,
as we tried to put out the lights of the Pelkey brothers
and their allies from across the alley, the Olsons.
But Louella Pelkey and Betty Perrier and Ruth Olson
and Evelyn Schug, too, let their sons go to war.
They were deathly afraid for us,
but told us how proud of us they were;
how handsome and manly we looked
when we came home from basic training
in our dress green uniforms
and same shaved heads
we wore during summer when we were kids.
Our mothers acted like our M-16s were pea-shooters,
like our howitzers harmlessly exploded stolen tomatoes
on the door of old man Umerski's dodge.
I wish my mom would've got me by the collar,
jerked me into the house, made me stay in my room
for the whole year of 1968.
In 1972, she told me she didn't know why she let me go.
Probably for the same reasons I went, I thought,
though neither of us could give voice to those reasons then.
She said she wished she would've grabbed my ear,
gave it a twist, and pulled me all the way to Winnipeg.
For both our own good.
