Abram Graham A True War Story	back to table of contents back to main

I recall killing birds as a boy.
I would scout all morning, then stare at the hole
on the side of our porch where a nest
was. Where chicks chirped at dusk, barked
at dawn, and I first felt a desire to kill.
Visceral need to murder, and bury.

My uncle wore a buckle he could bury
a gun behind. Big as a plate to a boy.
He said in Vietnam he got to kill
a gook with it who lived in a hole.
There bullets and rockets barked
at dawn, pleading with their mother from her nest

to feed the open beak of war, silence the nest.
There men smile murder, and bury
their heads in hands recalling, when dogs barked,
balls bounced, the games they played as boys,
before bullets, pistols plastic, a hole
something you dug in the yard, a dirt cork, no kill.

As a young boy I sharpened a stick to kill
with. I once murdered a bird in its nest.
I climbed up a spruce to the hole,
poked it through its throat, and flung it down to bury.
Told my uncle.  He said he once stabbed a boy
in Nam who shot at him. The gook's gun barked,

uncle slashed, and the face of the boy split like a barked
branch in the sun. He said that to kill
was better when he was a boy.
Later he was a bird, lived in a nest,
called for his mother, had to bury
the dead gook, with cold worms down a hole.

He said he wept while his knife pecked that hole
to hide the boy whose face had barked.
He dug to forget that sickening stab, to bury
his vicious desire for vengeance, to no longer kill.
In the end what he dug was a nest
in his head, where he was forever a boy.

He made me bury the bird, my kill,
in the hole that I made, in the nest
in my head, with the boy whose face barked.
 

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