This first day of National Poetry Month, we share a letter from Milwaukee poet Margaret Rozga, whose son was deployed to Afghanistan and wounded there. The poems in her forthcoming poetry collection, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad, concern her emotional response to her son’s active duty, the impact of the many stories she heard about troops her son served with and responses to information families were given concerning helping their returned GIs.

Margaret’s letter about her poems will be helpful to all of us who write, who understand something of what compels us to engage with and encounter our feelings, the images that stay with us, and the worlds of information we come across. There is a pleasure in writing, even about the painful and difficult parts of our lives. To have said what is at the bottom of our minds and our hearts offers release, offers the moment we can say, “Yes, that is how it felt. Exactly. That is how I still feel when I encounter the memory. This is what I know and can share with others.”

There are times that we as writers find a kindred spirit in reading others’ work. It is especially wonderful when those kindred spirits communicate with us about their writing. “Together we finished the song,” Margaret writes at the end of her letter. Life is a song and we sing it together.
 

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December 31, 2010

Dear Sheila,

All my visitors have returned home, so my house is suddenly very quiet. And New Year’s Eve seems like a good time to think and write, so here I am. I’ll attach a few poems. This new book, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad, will be published some time in 2011 by Benu Press, the same people who published 200 Nights and One Day in 2009. I don’t have an exact date yet.

But several of the poems have been published in journals. Nimrod published “The son returns home. Alive” and “Imbalance,” in fact, nominated them for inclusion in Best New Poets. That helped me begin to think about doing more.

“The son returns home. Alive.” happened quickly after a colleague told me that the cousin of one of the other soldiers in Matt’s unit was in her class and had repeated something her cousin told her. It was something about what he hadn’t told his mother. I had already been thinking about much of what found its way into the poem, but my colleague’s passing these words along made me write the poem.

The son returns home. Alive.

He sleeps in his childhood bed.
He does not have sand dreams.
In the morning, he descends the stairs
One at a time. She asks if
He is ready for pancakes.

At night, if he drinks, he does not
Drive. If he drives, he does not
See desert stretch out before him.
He understands speed limits, remembers
Rules of these roads, slows, yields.

Two-story buildings, walls grainy as sand,
Do not look like the Mosul Police Academy,
Flat-topped roof, exterior stairway where MPs
Can bound up stairs, two, three
At a time. There they do not think

About the way back down.

Here trucks dirty with sand speeding
Along boulevards carry only picnics,
Fishing rods. Their drivers look forward
To walleye, to old age and clean deaths.

As far as his mother knows
Spilling your guts is hyperbole, cliché.
He will not explode images in her life,
Will let her think she knows the whole
Gritty story, assume by some miracle

Even war time deaths, if not quiet, are clean.

Matt and I had sat down one day to look through his album of photos from Iraq, including those he took or someone took for him of the wreckage after the truck bomb incident where he was injured. So I saw the Mosul police academy where it happened, the steps on the outside of the building, the flat roof. Also on the day Matt’s unit returned, the Army Family Readiness folks met with family members to advise them to watch for things like too much drinking and reckless driving.

About the second poem, “Imbalance”–Matt’s ear drums were blown out by the force of the blast. When his sergeant phoned and told me this, I first thought that meant Matt would be deaf. Actually one ear healed by itself and the other was corrected surgically. But until (and even after) the surgery, I thought a lot about ears, about how ear injuries are invisible and how many people in Iraq must have damaged ear drums. Every time I hear(d) about a car or truck bomb, I wonder(ed) how many more ears were damaged. I wondered if they counted damaged ears in the count of how many were wounded. So all that thinking about ears led to the poem.

Imbalance

For Matthew, June 24, 2004

Cauliflower ears, size beyond sense
Spock ears pointing the way to heaven
Small ears flat against the skull like dried peach halves

A fleshy lobe, naked, inviting
Or pierced and studded, a challenge
To lick, taste, nibble

The ear — cartilage, skin, and flesh
An abalone shell without iridescence
A capital C; a question mark

Unanchored

An opening
A middle chamber subject to infection
Inner workings simple as a drum

And bones

Tiny hair follicles pick up motion
Initiate judgments, send them
On a fluid path to the brain, trying

To sift through sound for sense
Out there in our world
Thrown off-balance

Tympanic injury — ringing in the ears
War. Truck bombs. Explosions that send bodies
Flying, that blow out ear drums

Iraq, Israel, Palestine
Damaged ears

And those undamaged who do not hear

A third poem “Returning to Duty” was published in Memoir (and). I also sent this poem to the student of a colleague who just returned from Afghanistan and was looking for writing about Iraq and Afghanistan. He said this poem really identified something for him, that every soldier he knew had a story about a stranger who wanted to pump him (or her) for gory details.

Returning to Duty

You coming or going?
The stranger cuts into
this moment of peace
in the line at Starbuck’s.

Maybe it’s the uniform,
like visible pregnancy,
a sign read as
feel free; ask anything.

Going.

First time? Is that a no?
Going back? You already been there?
Seen any action

“Family Readiness Group” is a fairly new poem, but it’s about the meeting of family members right after the truck bombing in 2004 where two members of the unit were killed and matt and others were wounded. It is a very vivid memory though it took six years to write about it. In fact I wrote almost all of the Afghanistan poems before I went back to write that one. The dad of the two girls who have the crayons and are coloring was severely wounded and had multiple surgeries at Walter Reed to remove shrapnel. He lost the sight in one eye. It took a while for Matt and this dad to get permission to have treatment in Wisconsin. Matt was at Fort Knox. He had come home one weekend to get his truck, so when they got permission for treatment closer to home, Matt first drove to DC to pick up his friend and then they drove home together.

Family Readiness Group

Two little girls take out crayons and paper.
At the last meeting, they laughed.

Some families didn’t know who or what.
Their soldiers safe on base, not at the police academy.

One father cries. The blast
his daughter    on the ground thrown
against the       Humvee

The room is stuffy in the June heat, the chairs hard.
The crayons poised in mid-air

The officer from the 88th Regional Readiness Command
says he has the facts. Says convoy. Says IED.

Not the facts her husband, his daughter,
their son, her son phoned home.

There is no more comfort in non-facts than in facts.
Two wives, four children, are not here at all.

One draws blue circles, the other breaks her pink.

For a long time I didn’t think I could write about the Afghanistan deployment. It was so different. I thought maybe the Iraq poems would just be a chapbook. When I did get started on them, I wondered if they worked as individual poems. The poetry of them seems to come from repeating images and terms from poem to poem.

But here’s one of those that seems clearly to be able to stand alone.

Farewell

The pert reporter from Green Bay
asks the son how he feels.
Is it different the second time?

She turns to the mother,
positions the microphone at her mouth.
What is the worst thing you fear?

Before I close, I want you to know that I saved the last few pages of your memoir, A New Theology: Turning to Poetry in a Time of Grief to read this morning, and as I did so, I was struck by your description of the strawberry plants. From talking about their deepening red, you take a leap to “The bombs bursting in air.” It sent me reeling back in time.

When Matthew’s unit returned from Afghanistan, at the homecoming celebration, the sister of one of the soldiers was to sing the national anthem. She began beautifully, but her voice caught when she glanced at her sister in formation with the other soldiers. She managed to start up again, only to find it again too charged with emotion, right exactly at that phrase in the national anthem. What happened next was most remarkable. The crowd, as if under the direction of a maestro, picked up exactly together, in tune, on time, not at all hesitant, voices loud and clear. Together we finished the song.

Here’s the poem that I knew I wanted to write about this moment:

Welcome Home

It’s time for the ceremony.
The soldiers take leave
of their families to line up in formation.
All Army again, they stand at attention.

The sister of one of them
steps up to the microphone.
In a beautiful, clear voice she begins solo.
Oh, say can you see…

After bright stars she looks at her sister.
Her voice clouds up, begins to catch.
In the gaps as she struggles
toward gallantly streaming
a surge of emotion. The sisters,

mothers, wives, children,
friends, uncles, aunts, brothers, cousins,
as if under the sweep of the hand of a director,
as if in one voice, of one mind,
join in: the rocket’s red glare…

grow even stronger at the finish:
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Many thanks for giving me this opportunity to begin thinking and remembering the particulars of this process.

Yours,
Margaret Rozga