Baby Boom
Nov 3 2008


The men returned
to cheering and laughter,
the war to end war
and the one shortly after.
They were hard with contempt
for the incompetents who sent them
who led from behind;
full of unspeakable things
dammed up inside.

So they stripped off their tunics
resuming their lives,
making pay
making babies
re-acquainting with wives.
Who had turned into strangers
and who found they had changed,
soaking in sweat
bolting awake.

So they made some more babies
and made babies again,
which is all that makes sense
when you cannot forget.
When best friends will stay
forever young men,
and recurrent dreams
are haunted by death.

Their babies have grown now
and have grown some more,
never having known
their very own war.
So they probe you for stories
they know that time flees,
and they hope letting go
will let you go free.

But the dam remains strong
the pain buried deep.
And still, you can’t speak
of unspeakable things.




I try to write a Remembrance Day poem every year. Stylistically, this is a departure for me. The fairly regular rhyme and rhythm present certain limitations. But I think I managed to say what I wanted.

The (imminent) election of Barak Obama influenced me in the writing of this, as it did the last poem I posted. One pundit interpreted his Presidency as not just a possible transcendence of the politics of race, but as a generational change -- away from the dominating (and often resented) influence of the baby boomers. Which made me wonder whether anyone will know, 50 years from now, what we even meant when they encounter all those references to "boomers".

As I set out to write about this exceptional phenomenon of the boomer generation, I was influenced by a book review of Farley Mowat's recently published "Otherwise" I had just finished reading. The reviewer of talks about the transformational experience the Second World War had on him, and Mowat's bitterness towards war -- the death and destruction not just of man, but of the natural world.

So my "boomer" poem somehow transformed itself into a Remembrance Day poem: as it happens, just in time for November 11.