This day, December 7, 2006, marks the 65th anniversary of the day President Franklin D. Roosevelt said would “live in infamy.”
Of course, it still does, and because of that more recent “day of fire,” September 11, 2001, as noted by our current commander-in-chief, President George W. Bush, it stings the memory all the more.
Such days of unfathomable horror motivate poets to express their musings. Poet/professor Walt McDonald’s poem, “The Winter They Bombed Pearl Harbor,” subtly invokes the Pearl Harbor attack as almost an after-thought. But throughout the poem, we catch images that suddenly propel us from that family farm setting into the heart of war; one such image is “the roar and buzz of steel and mosquitoes,” and another is “lobbing frozen dirt clods like grenades.” And of course, the last stanza that brazenly inserts “Pearl Harbor bombed” and “the fall of Bataan” promising that war would not be lost, because the speaker’s father had enlisted.
If Walt McDonald fears too much patriotism, Marty Lewinter does not. Also, a professor as well as versifier, Lewinter offers poems that are quite literal and anything but subtle. Then there is “Pearl Harbor Day” by Irvin L. Rozier, not exactly a polished poem, but nevertheless, its sentiment is understandable. Other poems that commemorate the Pearl Harbor attack: “Pearl Harbor TO 911: Everlasting Changes,” by Ralph Maduike; “Pearl Harbor is its Name” and “USS Arizona Memorial: To Honor our Dead” on the web site Poetry for Veterans; “Always Remember” by John Chaffey, and “Surprised Infamy” by Roger Hancock.
Linda Brown’s poem, “Pearl Harbor’s Child” dismisses any notion of patriotism, sentiment, or raw emotion, except as she is able to muster for own self-grieving. Her first stanza goes, “I was born a week after Pearl Harbor / into a crib with an air raid siren. / It wailed nightly from the elm outside / until I went rigid as a hypnotist's steel board, / too scared--even in my mother's arms--to cry.” And then we’re treated to her being moved from one location to the other, until finally her speaker throws up her hands and says what else but a poet could such poor frightened devil have become.
All of the poems mentioned here are at various stages of accomplishment: some of the poets are merely gushing forth sentiment, not well crafted verse, just expressions of raw emotion. Still they are worth considering as we look back into history and reflect on events that will always elicit raw emotion.
