Leonski's Grave.(Poem)

 
LEONSKI'S GRAVE 
 
   West, the jet fighter rising from Hickham Field over the less 
      silver though sunlit ocean 
   is distant enough to be quiet, a leisured, tilting seabird. 
   Here, the grass is light green, island green in the sun, 
   as it slopes up by bent trees, ever mourners, to the whitestone 
      altar 
   of the National Memorial Cemetery, United States Forces, 
   a little way east of Pearl Harbor. 
   Up here, young men with military caps, old women in track suits and 
      bumbags 
   lope, stand, raise pointing fingers slowly to the names of heroes. 
      They seem to touch it. 
   From there to Eternity. For just over the mountain north-east in a 
      deep vale, unlikely, 
   in some discreet peace offering for the Pacific War, bows a 
      Japanese red-lacquered temple 
   beside a pond of stones and black water and carp. 
   The trees here are intenser green, a hedgerow in Hawaii. 
   We have to go north-west to Schofield Barracks, to a lawn corner of 
      its Post Cemetery, 
   to find one soldier who did not die for his country, yet by the 
      wish of that country is dead. 
 
   Eddie Leonski, what do we think of you now, 
   buried here in this Oahu grave to which no sign leads, 
   no heart tends, except maybe your mother's, or the line down from 
      her? 
   Ebullient GI, you strangled three Australian women 
   in the brownout, tram-dark Melbourne winter of '42, 
   one in rain so long and cold her remains 
   had to be cleansed, in the morgue, of thick yellow mud. 
   Because, you said, you desired their pretty voices. 
   "Any more dames you want choking," ...