A beautiful visual written about the tension filling our streets on the Day of Infamy, after reports on Pearl Harbor. Watch... NORFOLK, VIRGINIA by Robert P. Arthur Waking to light in Christmas snow Loom the distant guns Of Fort Monroe . . . chocked by age Morning bells, Quiet now. Flattops, five, in a row Toss in anchorage Ignoring protocol One strike would take them all Remember Pearl Harbor, Battleship Row Drifts of sleep near Old Fort Wool Hampton Roads harbor The Monitor fires on the Merrimack Now, in December snow Five carriers doze in nuclear arms Untroubled by Zeros Or the unthinkable fall of the world... What if Norfolk should fall? City of beaches, streams, lakes, creeks, bay and rivers flowing to the ocean . . . almost an island, riven, or archepelago Shot through and surrounded by blue Imaginal blood flows on every deck In Hampton Roads, or wing tip Dipping toward Dam Neck Or the Naval Air Station At Sewells Point City of might and death, the largest Military installation in the world I remember The boatswain’s whistle and flocks Of Navy boys flooding up the ramps Redemptive bridges The Bloody Bucket and Red Mule, alley fights drunken youths stumbling in nettled dark Blood spilling down their shirts I am a boy again Playing frogman at Ocean View, preparing for war My mother and grandmother working on planes and bombs The unimaginable bellicosity Carriers, cruisers, guided missile destroyers Frigates, amphibious assault vessels, submarines and absolution, in falling snow Naval Station Norfolk (Chambers Field) War planes soar overhead, every six minutes Little Creek Road Lakewood Breezy Point Broad Creek And downtown Norfolk Granby Street, Maury High School Now in stasis Contiguous to water Skyscrapers, museums, the opera house, the slums and Tempo Room Floods of muted traffic, rushing, silent The time is coming... Children trudge to school. Flattops grip the water Battleships, ghostly, raise long barrels through fields of snow Flush deck Destroyers peer through banks of flakes, their dark hearts pounding Marks 7, 8, 9, 10 The Indiana, Ramage, Wyoming, Eisenhower, Anzio Holding their breaths now, now waiting Hushed now, waiting, knuckled down, hushed, hunkered, waiting Marks 1, 4, A To fill the sky with holy fire Then as now in Christmas snow If Norfolk falls, so falls the world... Robert P Arthur
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 23:18:35 +0000
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