Tell the Men
by Dean Metcalf
1985: I came home to California from one of my freelance journalism trips to Central America, feeling pretty ragged. A friend recommended that I see an acupuncturist known for her ability to balance a person’s energies. As I was lying on the table, she was “reading my pulses,” the term she used to gauge what was happening inside a patient.
After a short time, she dropped my wrist and stepped back with a somewhat stricken look on her face. “Where have you been?” she asked. “… and what have you been doing?”
I replied, in a rush of words, that I’d been in southern Honduras, in a Contra camp on the Río Coco, which is the border with Nicaragua in that area. I told her I’d spent 8 days with 3 mercenaries – two North Americans and one Cuban who was a virulent anti-communist and who held his garotte in front of my nose with a smile like dry ice, after he found out I had sympathies for “the other side.” Also in the camp were a couple of dozen young Miskito and Sumo Indian warriors who never worried about where their rifle muzzles were pointing. They weren’t threatening me; they just weren’t trained to handle their weapons otherwise.
So I looked down a lot of rifle barrels that week.
I had a dream when I got home. I dreamed I was in command of a military detail. We were attacked from the air, and machine gun bullets were punching holes in the corrugated steel walls of the Quonset hut near my head.
This poem grew out of that dream, and out of experiences in Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua…
Tell the Men
by Dean Metcalf I. I am the dream commander. All around me along the smoky runway men fall, strafed spinning bloody down. I scream, but they will not believe: our own top secret quiet rotor radar guided night vision heat seeking dream metal dragonflies have returned to kill us. II. "But they're ours!" men scream as they stand, are hit, and fall spinningbloodydown. Running, my body floats above the runway among thumb size neon red tracers borne upon their own wind: puffs of it pass between my ribs. III. In this dream, only I know: words are weapons. All around me, men see, trying not to see. Men fail to aim their words at the real enemy. Men drop their books or read absently standing in the open as if life were not dangerous. IV. Sergeant! Work your way along the line. Tell the men: Fill sandbags with words. Build a parapet to fight behind. If they are the right words you live. Tell every man: Dip each fifth word in your own blood, so your shots will glow red: tracers to locate your targets in the dark. Tell every man to sharpen one word. Say, You must choose: "yes" or "no." Snap it onto your rifle, for when this gets down to bayonets. Tell all the men: It's not the men of darker skin who broadcast our blood upon the land as a poor shopkeeper tosses water from a red plastic pail to settle dust on an unpaved street. Tell the men: We toss our own blood in the dust where crimson arterial spurts of it roll into powdery skins like water in flour no longer recognizable as blood it could be any dark liquid: it could be used crankcase oil. Tell them: We live and die by what we think by what we write by what we say by what we do. Tell the men: Get your words. Get in the trenches. Here they come.
This poem was first published several years ago in the online journal RIVEN, edited by Michael Spring. Tell the Men© 2012 Dean Metcalf
About Dean Metcalf…
Dean Metcalf is the author of RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: An American Warrior’s Story, and a world-traveling journalist whose articles were distributed by Pacific News Service, San Francisco. His work has appeared in publications such as Denver Post, Cleveland Plain Dealer, San Jose (CA) Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice, South Africa Weekly Mail, Oakland (CA) Tribune, Sacramento Bee, and San Francisco Review of Books. Read more about Dean here.
Purchase RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: An American Warrior’s Story here.
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Strong and important stuff. Thank you. Please keep writing.
Thank you, Patrick. I will keep writing. I have no choice…