Selected Poems

If you are able

save for them a place

inside of you…

And save one backward glance

when you are leaving

for the places they can

no longer go…

Be not ashamed to say

you loved them,

though you may

or may not have always…

Take what they have left

and what they have taught you

with their dying

and keep it with your own…

And it that time

when men decide and feel safe

to call the war insane,

take one moment to embrace

those gentle heroes

you left behind…

- 1 January 1970

Twenty-four

should be a great deal

like twenty-three,

waiting for the acne

to find someplace to go.

Twenty-four

will be a year

lost to the way …

Twenty-four

will be the year

I waited to be twenty-five.

I shall be

watching myself very closely.

- 13 August 1969

I have tasted the air

in the early morning, before the sun

and before the day …

I have let it run all

down my face

and stain my clothes

and I have learned to wash myself

with the part of the day

that remains …

I am dying in the sun at Dak To …

I am each day

becoming less interested

in the way the morning tastes,

and I am dying in the sun at Dak To …

and I am dying in the sun at Dak To …

- 18 March 1970