My War Poem

Update 9/02/14:  I'm a day late to this prompt from The Garden, where Magaly asks if we have a favorite writing place.  I do not.  I have composed verse, prose and music in my head while driving on the expressway and while falling asleep [or more realistically tossing and turning] in bed at night.  Once in the white heat of inspiration I madly scribbled part of a story on a hotel room note pad while sitting in a food court at a mall in Toronto.

It's an Open Link Monday entry, with an opportunity to "link one of your poems, regardless of theme or format or date of publication." Recently I was rummaging through the archive and remembered this from a couple years back.
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I was reading the chapter on war poems in Michael Bugeja's book last night and thought I didn't have a war poem in me.  Then I went to bed and composed this on my pillow before going to sleep.


THE GENERATION OF GREATNESS

We call them America's
Greatest generation
My father my uncles all those
Other men I worked with when
I started my first job in 1968
Were drunks

Years later Jimmy Carter would
Lobby against the 3 martini
Lunch these men lived on
Ice jammed into a short
Tumbler filled to the brim
With gin

Not so for my father a shot
And a beer man of simpler tastes
Kesslers and Strohs could
Get you just as drunk
Though maybe not quite
As fast

If they also serve who only stand
And wait what greater service it
Must be to get shipped across the Atlantic
Four fifths of the way back to
The place your mother escaped so many
Years earlier

He never told me what he did there
Nor of any British girls He might have
Americanized certainly not combat
Nor flying bombing missions
Maybe it was some dumb desk job with
A typewriter.

He told me once that to cure
The boredom he'd go into London
With his buddies on a Saturday night
And watch the bombs fall but
This might well have been
A lie

The booze was true though Gin
Whiskey Beer pick your medication
Anesthetic poured onto the
Scars crusting over deep
Old war wounds that never
Really healed