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Jeffrey Alfier
Beyond April – A Guardmount for Refugees
They relieved me from my post guarding jets
that slept in steel caves waiting for bombers
that never came, saying they needed me
to guard refugees just in from the fall
of South Vietnam -- too tired to sow
their future beyond our statecraft that failed.
Coming to the ramp where they disembarked,
the captain told me to keep reporters
away from the buses we packed them in,
but not the non-comms who'd been at Danang
and Phu Cat airfields. They came to collect
the rice bugs buried in refugee coats
- caught in the tide of exigent travel -
just to brandish them in our young faces.
Free of their captors, the insects drifted
to the sleek skins of interceptor jets.
The misplaced idealism of my youth
was still in fear of Domino Theories.
But here they were: the dominoes themselves.
Epitaphs for things too easy to name.
McChord Air Force Base, WA, late Spring, 1975
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