On a Morning Full of Sun - the ghosts of war - Cover Story - Poem

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Philip Appleman

On a Morning Full of Sun

   One of our gulls
   is keening in the flat
   blue light: something
   is gone, is gone, is gone--a hundred
   teen-age boys picked out
   of mud, zipped into
   plastic bags, and air-mailed
   home to Mom.

   White wings sweep over our beach
   in formation: straw huts leap
   into flame--something
   is gone, is gone--
   I stagger up the sand,
   press my M-16
   to the skull of a peasant girl,
   and watch the bone
   go chipping off and dancing
   through the flat blue keening
   air.

Philip Appleman received the Humanist Arts Award from the American Humanist Association in 1994. He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1944 to 1945 and in the U.S. Merchant Marine Corps in 1946 and from 1948 to 1949. He is the author of three novels, including In the Twelfth Year of the War; a half-dozen nonfiction books, including the new third edition of the Norton Critical Edition, Darwin; and seven books of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996, from which the above poems are reprinted. This article is adapted from War, Literature, and the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities.