StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. XXIX

The longest day of the year,
More or less,
The Solstice, the summer sun
And all that:
I've reached the age
When my body feels better
Under the warm rays
Of July and August
-- Younger, more flexible
Then when the earth
Is on the other side of its orbit,
When the northern hemisphere,
My hemisphere, tilts away
From the yellow white dwarf
That serves us so well and yet,
As much I like the seasons,
Winter sucks in January
When the temperature is twenty
And the wind is blowing
As you wait in the snow at the bus stop.

I have led a charmed life,
A charm of my own making,
Emerging from disasters,
Bruised, battered, but alive.

I have overcome opposition,
Sometimes running over them,
Sometimes running around them,
Flaying my charm in all directions.

Each night I sacrifice a virgin vegetable,
A carrot or sometimes a cabbage,
In the pure white flame of my recyclable
Vegan Altar: my charm is earned and payed for.

Each month I give ten percent of my charm
To the poor and desolate, the people of any color
But white; That these people tend to be my friends
And family, honors my many splendored bloodlines.

My charm is all things to all people, the answer
To what ever ails you: take and eat of my charm
And you too will understand, for I am the truth
And knowledge, believe in me, believe.

It's scary to watch the kids go by
In tee shirts that were threatening in 1955
And jeans with designer stitching
And carefully cut knee holes;
So easily impressed with a large sandstone building
And the flash of loaded guns
Dressed in their best jack boot black.

I think we are number three or four
On the Washington tour,
Wedged somewhere in between
Mount Vernon and an Old Town lunch
And a visit to the Lincoln Memorial
And the Reflecting Pool come sunset.

God bless the Great American Field Trip,
For without out it, what would girls and boys do
But study English and History and all those others
We no longer care or test for.

Cigarettes along the gutter,
Grass three days after mow,
Garbage bags along the sidewalk,
Weeds growing in the cracks.

Bushes assuming their summer green,
Lillies fading with the spring,
Birds loudly waking from their trees,
As a jogger resolutely passes.

Cars and buses, drivers and slugs,
Passengers onboard the Metro bus,
American born, Thai, Columbian,
Salvador, Persia, Arabia, and Nam.

Officers, enlisted, government workers,
Uniforms, camis, ties, and iPods,
Winding inward towards the district,
Presidents, generals, spies and terrorists.

Blue sky, yellow sun,
White clouds patching picturesque;
End of shift, more or less,
All go home to start all over again.

Ancient bus dead on the tarmac,
New bus, a slow green wonder,
Takes forever to reach top speed
-- Uphill? You'd better fugetaboutit.

Faster than a speeding comuter,
Big glass windows,  fierce burning sun,
Air conditioning, apparently a no-no,
It's carbon footprint too large to allow.

My life has been one bridge construction
After another, suposedly straight lines
That come suddenly to a stop
Or zig-zag wildly while I attempt to vector
In the general direction of what I thought
Was my original destination.

Who knew how much more interesting
The detours would prove to be than the
Dreary travel guides of well intentioned
Teachers and high school counselors.

Who would not sign up for a grand adventure,
To mars, to Titan, to the stars beyond?
If you could save the world
Or even feed just one more child,
Is there anything you would not do or try?
What is to live if not to die with purpose;
A meaningless, unpurposed live is worse
Than never havin' taken a breath at all.

Born in 1896 to an ironmonger's wife in north-east London,
Dead at 113 in the St Dunstan's care home, near Brighton, East Sussex,
In between he fought the Great War, watched men go over the top at Ypres,
Married his wife in 1918,  buried her in 1970, the only woman he ever kissed;
He was was 67 when John F Kennedy was assassinated,
73 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and still remembered
When he was 15 picking up his mother's newspaper
And being shocked that the Titanic has gone down so simple.

Soldiers just standing there in mud-filled trenches, in two feet of water
As they waited there to go forward, knowing what was coming;
A shellhole in Flanders, shelter for the night, stinking of arms and legs,
Dead rats and rotten flesh, human guts and everything
-- He couldn't get a bath for three or four months afterwards
And took the smell of decay with him everywhere when he left.

He never gave his cherry away in all his time on the front,
(Although he knew a lot of men who did and did not blame them),
Dorothy was the love of his life, his only one and ever,
Who gave him his daughters, five grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren,
And 14 great-great grandchildren and one great-great-great
By the time he followed her in death four decades later.

Allingham was just 14 when the Great War broke out,
His mother begged, pleaded with him not to join;
After her death, he waited a year,
The shortest respectful time for proper mourning.
So it came to pass in 1915,  he signed up with millions of others,
Not knowing he would become a symbol of his  generation.  
How could he have lived so long?  How could anyone?
When he was born, the speed limit was two miles an hour;
In the twenties and thirties, tens of millions were out of work.
He died still surprised he had survived the First War,
The last surviving founder member of the Royal Air Force,
The last man to have witnessed the Battle of Jutland,
The last survivor of the Royal Naval Air Service.

A dignified man, a gentle man, everything afterwards came as a reward,
He knew he was not a kid anymore but still he tried to get around,
Making his own happiness, whatever age he might be,
Seeing the funny side of life -- although he said he had a sense of humor --
Never giving up, never surrendering to the inevitable:
If people asked the secret for a long life, he admitted he didn't know
Any other answer but to keep on going.

He buried his memories of The War, like so many others,
Tried to forget his time in battle, avoiding reunions and refusing
To discuss the subject at all with his many generations of family.
In the last years of his life, when he met other veterans,
They never spoke one word of the war,

The first time he went near an airplane was on patrol in the North Sea,
A navigator and a mechanic for newly invented flying machines:
The bi-planes themselves didn't have much speed a few past invention,
Sometimes the wind would stand them still, sometimes the wind would push them backwards.
Aboard ship as an airborne spotter with the British Grand Fleet at Jutland,
A German shell headed directly for the Kingfisher, but skipped, somehow, over the top
Or the ship would have been gone in a fiery black bubble.

On the western front, in those trenches 
Filled with knee-deep water,
Men like hermit crabs, ate and slept,
Marching for miles only to stop
To dig new trenches that would fill with water
Before they were ordered to march again.
Allingham thought the men in the trenches
Were what won the war for Britain;
Allingham thought he had an easy time.

As the number of veterans of the Great War dwindled,
The British Government made plans for the last known veteran
To be honored with a National Memorial Service at Westminster:
Allingham said he didn't mind as long as it wasn't him.

He retired to Eastbourne forty years past,
Outliving his wife and daughters who died in their eighties;
Whenever he saw people wearing poppies
He remembered all those years in France
When death and the fear of death were as close and real
As the poppies growing in the fields all around him.

The decades made his eyesight fail, and at the end,
He could no longer see the red flowers.
When someone told him they were wearing a poppy,
He would ask if he could feel the flower,
Finding comfort in the knowledge
That people were still paying their respects
To those who fought the War To End All Wars:

Pinning a poppy to your chest is a sign you remember
All those men who didn't want war but volunteered anyway,
Having no idea of the horror and brutality they would face
Or that they would would live so long with the memory.

Henry Allingham
1896-2009
Dead in his sleep at 03:10, 18 July 2009
At his care home in Ovingdean near Brighton
Aged 113 years and 42 days
A veteran of the First World War

Sun behind us, we one eighty the ramp,
Wheeling into the morning,
Forty people, a fully loaded bus,
Travelling, unthinking, the highway.

Cars, trucks, buses, cycles,
Jammed well up and slowly,
Too many people, too few new roads,
Public transit grows exhausted.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

-- Neil Armstrong

We have tickets to see The Kangaroo Orchestra
When they play the Verizon Center next August;
The last we saw them, we were travelling in Oz
And they were the opening act for a Men At Work reunion
Over at the Opera House in Sydney.

We had just come from some new name chief restaurant
That had charged us too much, even at a good exchange rate,
For Seared Ahi Tuna and the Grilled Lamb Tenderloins
Butchered fresh that afternoon at a some local ranch.

They'll be the last Earth act we see
Before we move to the suburbs around Clarke Station
And try to grow Joshua Trees and Saquaro
In the red sands around our fullerdome.
Our closest venue for music will be the auditorium
Over in Heinlein and the Church of Non-Believers
Come weddings and Sunday mornings.

I'll be singing a husky contralto in the choir
While Sharon watches from somewhere back in the pews,
Wondering how we got here and how long we have left
Before one of us moves on and the mystery train
That serves us so well rolls to a final, undramatic stop
That scatters our ashes across the Elysium plain.