The Poetry of Vernon Waring
war baby
In this moment before birth,
I am turning,
a tiny mass of flesh/bones
struggling for the light,
my slippery cord unraveling,
my head a mess of milk white fuzz
that pushes down and through,
my wrinkled eyes sealed,
arms fingers legs
rubbery red wet.
My mother's family waits outside,
a Greek chorus drinking black coffee,
relieved that the labor is over.
Someone marks the time:
two-twenty-three-a-m,
and my father, half-drunk,
plays the guitar in a nightclub
somewhere in South Philly.
He does not even know,
as his callous young fingers
interpret "Stardust,"
that his first son
has been born.
Someone gives him the news,
buys him a drink,
while my mother,
beautiful serene sedated,
smiling like Rita Hayworth
in a pin-up picture,
cradles me with nervous sighs.
She is tended now
by hospital people
who daydream about loved ones,
fearful and faraway,
points on a fiery map.
But I am just another baby
in an era when babies are mass produced
like munitions.
I was conceived sometime
in the dawn of a new year,
the result of two militant lovers making up
while the rest of the world
lusts for the blood of boys
born twenty years before...
a war baby
who brings no peace.
Copyright by Vernon Waring