GREENFIELD — Bloodshed and bravery, sorrow and suicide, guilt and gallantry — a group of veterans and writers gathered in Greenfield Saturday to read their poems about war, and all of the emotions and experiences that come with it.
It was the third annual poetry reading at Poet’s Seat Tower hosted by Warrior Writers, a veterans national nonprofit organization that focuses on artistic expression for therapeutic and community building reasons.
“I think we have a special mandate to speak about the memories veterans have,” said Eric Wasileski. “I feel it’s the right place at the right time.”
Wasileski has been organizing the reading at Poet’s Seat for the last three years, after a couple years of involvement with Warrior Writers in Boston. He grew up in western Massachusetts, attended Greenfield High School, and served in the Navy from 1991 to 1998, being deployed for the bombing campaign against Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, in the late 90s.
Saturday he was the first to speak, and his poems shared his experiences of war.
“Here is the catch, 22 veterans die each day by their own hand,” was the entirety of his first poem, a haiku titled “Catch 22.”
Other poets too focused on the suicide epidemic among veterans. Former U.S. Navy SEAL Preston H. Hood III served in Vietnam in 1970. His poetry reflected not only his own experiences in war, but also memorialized his son, a Marine Corps veteran who committed suicide in 2001.
“…the shooting car crash of my son by his own hands…” he described his son’s death solemnly.
Hood’s poems recalled vividly the year he was in Vietnam. One poem was about a 24-hour reprieve in Saigon, South Vietnam, when Hood experienced night life in a foreign place, surrounded by the sounds of a foreign language.
“I’m on a 24-hour reprieve from my normal search and destroy missions, as other members of SEAL Team 2 drink in a nearby bars or smoke cigarettes while haggling with pimps over the prostitutes inside,” Hood read.
“I’m just one man walking down the street in a country at war. All of us soldiers or civilians, Vietnamese or Americans, are the targets of the 122 millimeter rockets that whoosh in silent and then explode,” he continued. “As the blast moves near, my taught skin head twitches with fear, 20 meters away and closing I see my dream car, a two-tone blue and white ‘55 Chevy Bel Air with its name shining in gold script as it passes by and continues on. I pause to watch it disappear into the darkness of Saigon, and just then, when I begin to turn, a rocket blows up so close to me it rips off my shirt as I’m thrown from the street to a doorway.”
Wasileski said the poetry is meant to encompass the full range of experiences with war, and that sentiment was reflected by the other readers.
Linda Wlodyka, of Cheshire, drove about an hour to read her poetry, which she said is mostly about watching war “from afar.” She is not a veteran herself, but had friends die in the Vietnam war while growing up. Remembering her late father, a World War II Navy veteran, was also a focus in her poetry.
“Dad, I’m glad that you’re up there in heaven. Being here is okay for now. One day, I’ll catch up with you. Today, I’ll wish upon a bloody star,” she read.
Some of the poems were dark and blunt, like Doug Anderson’s “Judgment.”
“Pinned down two hours in a Buddhist graveyard by two barefoot snipers who will not die, no matter how many mortars we walk their way,” said Anderson, a Marine Corps veteran who served as a medic in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968.
“They keep moving, the one firing, the other doubling back where the mortars have already been, nor are they silenced by the gun ship now squandering rockets at the ink blots flickering between trees,” he read. “These wraiths sing with their crack and whine, ‘We will die to hold you here, while the others slip away toward the mountains. What will you die for?’”
Army veteran Al Miller, who served in the infantry in 1968 and 1969, read a poem about being in a soldiers’ hospital.
“’Nurse, nurse my stumps are bleeding,’” read the refrain.
Ted Cromack, a U.S. Air Force veteran, read, “Tokyo,” a poem about being stationed in Tokyo in 1947 after World War II and seeing the destruction that had come upon the city.
“I recall the scenes of Tokyo, of war torn streets and hovels, family in a large safe high on a concrete pillar… a geisha girl in colorful kimono hoping for a G.I. to pay for her…” Cromack said. “Sights and sounds of Tokyo, 1947, remembering Pearl Harbor, 1941.”
Reach David McLellan at dmclellan@recorder.com or 413-772-0261, ext. 268.