Lifetimes

This is one of my poems and is an award-winning one.
The Guns of July
“I am the grass.Let me work.” — Carl Sandburg
The sheer cliffs above ocean roar Near Muir Beach Are dotted with gun emplacements, Cement and steel-plated half circles Buried deeply In the rocky sides. Giant, tall-stemmed yarrow and cowpen daisy, beach morning
glory and hedge mustard, blue pod lupine and
monkeyflower, silver phacelin
Push around them,
Burrow into the soil that the wind and rain have slowly
Deposited onto the reinforced roofs.

An occasional buzzard
Glides slowly above these empty warnests,
Searching, wondering. In the hollows of these relics, Civilians have tagged the back walls with names, With a heart and a cross or two, and with sly comments.
Forlorn after fifty empty years, these gray cement mouths speak not. No plaque, marker, or seashore sign reflects a purpose. Their builders and the young watchers who manned them do not testify.
The gulls ignore them
As do the brown pelicans who flap and then coast single file
but two feet above the blue waters below this day’s brilliant sky.
The young men who watched there, big-cased shells at the ready,
wake up gray, some white.
Not a few are dead.
This is good.
Off across the wide Pacific
Jungle tangle and roots have consumed the uniforms, the buried and unburied bones,
Joined together with the salt and seaspray, relentlesly
destroy the debris of war,
Save perhaps a forgotten bulldozer
Or one large wing from a downed fighter.
Poppies have flourished for eight decades in the
rich blood of Flanders
The sands of Normandy sparkle in the Channel sun.
Centuries hence earthquake and the relentless toiling waves will
crumble these Muir Beach bastions,
These warnests,
These constructs of man’s folly,
Man’s fear.
June, July 1994, May 1995