Hurrah

A poem about continuity. Allison Park, Pa., 12/22/1998.

Stooped men with long white beards
and medals two generations old
shuffled through a gauntlet
of flags and gentle applause
on a crisp Saturday in 1930
when the boy my father used to be,
not yet big enough for long pants,
stood on a Cleveland sidewalk.
Before his eyes –

(after the middle-aged veterans
of Hearst’s war strode by,
after the proud collective strut
of the over-there boys,
still in their prime,
minus the occasional limb or eye)

– the Johnnys who marched home
marched by again.
It was rote by then, so many years later.
Each slower on octogenarian legs,
each soldier-boy proud
in his blue, baggy relic of belly-fire days,
musty epaulets arranged just so.
“I remember that parade distinctly,”
my father says.

When I was little, he had a joke.
He’d extend his palm and say
“This is the hand
that shook the hand
that shook the hand
that shook the hand
that shook the hand
that shook the hand
of George Washington.”

Today, in long pants,
it is he who is stooped and bearded white,
though his nearsighted eyes saw no battles.
One day, after he is gone, I will tell my children
that I am the man
whose father was the man
who saw the men
who fought Lincoln’s war.

©2017, Ted Anthony

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