Mary B. Moore
Legacies
The helicopter dragonflies by,
daisy wheels on its beanie,
the flight unlikely, tail tipping up,
nose slightly down,
over the roofs and tree tops––
I can’t tell if it’s Channel Four’s
or the hospital’s. Chop chop,
whip whip, the blades say,
Hurry up, hurry up.
Every afternoon one high-tails it
down Four-Pole creek,
camouflaged, green, brown, tan:
irregular spatters, flowers or
foliage. Its decor still mimics
jungle’s canopy.
Girls didn’t fight in ‘Nam.
Boys did. One I loved
saved the tossed coin
that saved him. The next
medic run he’d lucked
out of blew a land mine.
One fled to Canada,
a musician, he’d played for
want of guitar
the push-button radio as he
taught me to drive
the salmon-pink finned Plymouth.
My Dad couldn’t drive
or teach me by then, stroked
into nowhere, no mind,
his blood-pressure, sky-high:
he’d tail-gunned in a B52’s
glass womb or tomb.
The whirly bird bears
its glass egg on its nose.
It emblems my era’s war.
Mary B. Moore is the author of Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys Press, 2017) winner of the Emrys Press poetry chapbook competition, selected by Dorianne Laux; Flicker (Broadkill River Press, 2016), winner of the Dogfish Head Poetry prize, judged by Carol Frost, Baron Wormser, and Jan Beatty; Eating the Light (Sable Books 2016), winner of the Sable Books Chapbook Contest, judged by Allison Joseph; and The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1998). Recent work appears in Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Nimrod, Fire and Rain, Ecopoetry of California, Orison’s 2017 anthology, Poem/Memoir/Story, the Nasty Women Anthology, Minerva Rising, and Cider Press Review Best of Volume 16. Her website is marybmoorepoetry.com.
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