Daniel Wilcox- Two Poems

The Signal of a Flag

Red Disk of the Sun waving out
Honor, obedience, duty, and self-sacrifice
Of too many a solider.
The blood-sotted flapping wave of the rising ‘sol
Less’ nation lighting “the darkness of the entire world.”*
Another  ‘human specious’ flag-lyre
Of Nipponese faith, all flying blind

In the dissonance,
In the Shintoic sun, waving
In the wind of samurai and bushido arms,
The final deafening flash of many falling sons
In the midst of this infernal sun-blazing
Eoned ‘cannibal’ night,
“10,000 years” the soldier’s shrieking cry—
Historical ‘Cymbaled’ zero

3 pilots kamikazed this dark night deathing,
Saski, Hayashi, and Taushima;*
Not falling to ‘idled’ worship toward their eastern Molech,
3 committed to no glorious slaughter but
Lovers of mused beauty, 4 loquacious languages,
And the spoken classics of Europe,
But drafted into a ‘sol-less’ grasping fire,
They zeroed their fallen wings,
Too close to the sun’s blinding brilliance,
Down into gunning American ships at only 22,
Their headless coded demise,
To the lightless silence
Of banzai’d death-sun--
So much flagging
Noise.

*Takushima Norimitsu hoped to be a noncombatant, a navy accountant, but he was drafted to become a kamikaze pilot, He wrote in his diary, “The idea that one is patriotic and thus would sacrifice oneself is a thought for the stupid masses. It is a type of narcissistic mania…I advocate free contacts and exchange among the peoples of the world. I hate the rise of nationalism…I am far from falling into the trap of jingoism. I have simply transformed my concerns for my country during the university days into love of country.” (Kamikaze Diaries by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney)

The Wind Blew Away the Young

(Dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut)

Down the fallen flamed millenniums

The endless, obscene burnings

Of the innocent, the kind, the young;

Into the carnaged abyss of the sinking goddess' son

Emperor Hirohito, the Incarnate daemon struts,

Safe and secure (with his war-lording generals)

In their godless ease, this son not dying until

Later in a cancerous hell of '89, long after

The 300,000 'children' of Nanking bled

Through eternity in the burning breeze--

The helled wind blew away the young sons;

As did General LeMay in the nighttime hail marying

Of incendiary clusters, magnesium so white and cancered,

The napalm carpet-bombing of half a million civilians

Into twisting, torched fiery sacrifices,

Far more Molochian than any other war officer,

Burning more in 6 'Baalful' hours than any ever,

From the glowing end of his clenched cigar,

The devil's phallus, loaded awards, medaled to his grill

Piled high the burned flesh of the armless ones--

The helled wind blew away the young sons,

And "Little Boy" fire-wiped the eyes

Of the thousands of children, dropping them

Like small millstones to Gehenna’s depth

Until their irises hissed, melted, and ran down

Their flamed faces next to where their immaculate

Mothers’ flesh encrusted the fired town walls thanks

To Officer Tibbets the superfortress flyer out of the Pit

Stating, “Hell yeah, I’d do it again, the infernal total war lie,

Loaded with cigars in shirt pockets and plane holds

Out-Heroding Judah's king, but Rachel weeps--

The helled wind blew away the young sons.

In contrast, against the rising demonic sun ship and plane,
Medal of Honor winners Gilmore and Doss

Fought with courage, the former in his deadly sub

The latter with his Bible and medicine, all alone

Rescuing 69 wounded, abandoned Americans

Off a sheer cliff under relentless machine-gun fire

Without killing a Nippon's son or child or babe--

The helled wind blew away the young sons.

Vonnegut, the third of these valorous ones

Warrior of honor who sought the right,

Before he died recently as it always goes

When he cursed the obscenity of total war

For the helled wind blows away the young,

The old, the sincere, the loving, the kind,

The patient and the wise as did it once

When the world was cruelly young,

Descending into the helled wind--

Killing an only beloved dear son.

 *Howard Gilmore, sub commander who, when wounded while in up in the conning tower by a Japanese arms ship, told his crew to close the hatch and take her down. He died bleeding in the salt sea so that many Americans including his crew could live free.

Desmond Doss refused a war deferment, yet refused to pick up a rifle, and later rescued the commanding officer who had tried to kick him out of the army. Later when Doss was wounded, he saw another soldier more wounded than him and insisted the stretcher-bearers set him down and take the other soldier. He spent two years in the hospital after the war ended. The soldiers who had ridiculed him later searched the battlefield for his lost Bible. He came to save lives not to kill the innocent or even the guilty.

(U.S. News and World Report)

First pub. Mad Swirl, 12/2/09

Bio: Daniel's wandering lines have appeared in many magazines in the United States, Canada, and overseas including Contemporary American Voices, Write Room, Static Movement, vox poetica, Fish Food, Poetry Pacific, Counterexample Poetics, and Unlikely Stories IV.

Before that Daniel hiked through the University of Nebraska, Cal State University, Long Beach (Creative Writing), Montana, Pennsylvania, Europe, Arizona, and Palestine/Israel. He now lives on the central coast of California with his quilting wife.