A poem by Stan

That young man lounging by the gate
With his quiet laugh and quiet eye
And drawling tendency to be late

Will roll those eyes slowly and die
In an unknown desert from an unseen blow
His fingers itching and his throat gone dry.

I wrote this poem in 1983 as a threat for some of my eighth grade students who could not and would not believe that they could ever be forced to go to war. I recall a young man named Abelardo, in particular, who was particularly arrogant in his arguments, those were the old ways and those were the old days and we had reached a new understanding in the United States about war.

Would that he had been right.