Slumped in a prickly armchair on a humid summer night, I listened dully to dogs barking with brainless pleasure far away and in this street under the Victory flags. The bronze eagles with spread wings, flightless on walls and porches, reflected the light from stars, as my slow imaginings moved between foreign corpses and these Stars and Stripes of ours. Sweaty, itching, impotent, I scratched my shirtless shoulder and reached for another beer — like a listless President dreaming a new world order from idle thoughts and hot air. Or like someone long inured to the crafted, public lies that lull the popular mind into easy disregard for the coarse realities of imperial command. The Heroes were coming home — but not to me in my chair dogged by barks and disarray; "Welcome!" the flags flapped, "Welcome! you fought for all we hold dear in the mighty USA."

Copyright © 1991 by Tony Connor. Appears courtesy of the author.

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Poems by This Author

Elegy for Alfred Hubbard by Tony Connor Hubbard is dead, the old plumber The Summer House by Tony Connor The Danube glitters and toils

Further Reading

Poems for Summer Tempest, Act V, Scene I [Where the bee sucks, there suck I] by William Shakespeare A Boat, Beneath a Sunny Sky by Lewis Carroll A Boy and His Dad by Edgar Guest A Green Crab's Shell by Mark Doty A Lesson for This Sunday by Derek Walcott A Path Between Houses by Greg Rappleye After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard by Charles Wright Alice at Seventeen: Like a Blind Child by Darcy Cummings Anastasia & Sandman by Larry Levis And You Thought You Were the Only One by Mark Bibbins Arms by Richard Tayson August by Algernon Charles Swinburne Back Yard by Carl Sandburg Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson Daffy Duck In Hollywood by John Ashbery Fat Southern Men in Summer Suits by Liam Rector Fishing on the Susquehanna in July by Billy Collins For Once, Then, Something by Robert Frost Ground Swell by Mark Jarman I know I am but summer to your heart (Sonnet XXVII) by Edna St. Vincent Millay I see the boys of summer by Dylan Thomas I, Up they soar by Inger Christensen Idyll by Siegfried Sassoon If You Get There Before I Do by Dick Allen In Summer by Paul Laurence Dunbar In the Mountains on a Summer Day by Li Po Jack by Maxine Kumin Jet by Tony Hoagland June Light by Richard Wilbur Let Birds by Linda Gregg Long Island Sound by Emma Lazarus Making the Bed by Burt Kimmelman Midsummer by William Cullen Bryant Mint by Elaine Terranova Miracles by Walt Whitman Muffin of Sunsets by Elaine Equi My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer by Mark Strand On 52nd Street by Philip Levine On Summer by George Moses Horton On the Grasshopper and the Cricket by John Keats Poem at Thirty by Michael Ryan Poem for Adlai Stevenson and Yellow Jackets by David Young Psychoanalysis: An Elegy by Jack Spicer Rhode Island by William Meredith Sally's Hair by John Koethe Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (Sonnet 18) by William Shakespeare Solstice by Ellen Dudley Sonnet 7 [The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings] by Petrarch South by Jack Gilbert Summer by Amy Lowell Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina by Jack Gilbert Summer Holiday by Robinson Jeffers Summer Images by John Clare Summer in the South by Paul Laurence Dunbar Summer Night, Riverside by Sara Teasdale Summer Nights and Days by Rachel Hadas Summer Past by John Gray Summer Song by William Carlos Williams Summer Stars by Carl Sandburg Summer X-Rays by Nina Cassian Swimming in the Presence of Lurid Opposition by Sawako Nakayasu The Abduction by Stanley Kunitz The Family Photograph by Vona Groarke The Fishermen at Guasti Park by Maurya Simon The Fly by William Blake The Idea of Order at Key West by Wallace Stevens The Last Slow Days of Summer by Phillip Lopate The Philosopher in Florida by C. Dale Young The Summer House by Tony Connor The White Room by Charles Simic They'll spend the summer by Joshua Beckman This Lime Tree Bower My Prison by Samuel Taylor Coleridge Three Songs at the End of Summer by Jane Kenyon Vacation by Rita Dove Vertumnal [excerpt] by Stephen Yenser Vespers by Louise Glück Warm Summer Sun by Mark Twain Wildflower by Stanley Plumly