LEGACIES

Turning the pages carefully

I asked about the ghastly

horsemen and their steeds,

white, black, red, and pale.

Grandmother was hard put

to answer, proud of Uncle Max,

gassed in battle at the Marne,

she couldn't speak of purpose,

but now I'll say it in her place:

They know what they are doing.

Me too. I'm off with Unzan

in his venerable Suzuki

speeding past construction

of yet another passing lane

and we stop for gas at Kea_au.

It's thirty miles to Hilo

from my pretty house on lava

extending to the ocean

and sometimes whales,

not so many these past years.

Celeste remarks my presence

and Harriet, my vital signs;

I josh with Benjamin Ono, M.D.

about the state of my interior

and its defenses, vain at last.

I plan a modest legacy of papers

filed in boxes, neatly catalogued,

soon enough composted and forgotten,

while the half-life of my other legacies

is not forgotten, until the world is.

-Robert Aitken 2003

SOURCE - This poem was one of 16,000 submitted and one of the few published by Poets Against the War

" Poets Against the War was officially born when Laura Bush invited me to attend a White House symposium on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes, scheduled for February 12, 2003. But it was truly born in the hearts of each of us long before the naively planned and quickly "postponed" symposium. The "postponement" continues today, the White House having faced its only public humiliation when we rose in unison to defend not only our nation's conscience, but poetry itself." -Sam Hamill