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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3634 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Before the Start of the Second Gulf War Jim Doss I feel good, like I knew that I would I feel nice, all sugar and spice --James Brown Another wet Saturday in a rainy spring. Water dribbles over gutters clogged with last year’s leaves and puddles in the dog-pocked yard. Inertia molds me into the couch, posed like a Greek statue in underwear, with nothing to do but channel-surf as I ignore the flash flood of angry shouts that briefly cataracts over the railing in the kids’ battle for sibling dominance. In the no-harm-done quiet, I hear soul brother number one, James Brown, singing “I Feel Good” through the frames of a PBS documentary. His voice streams over the roof-mounted loudspeakers of a Toyota pickup that weeks before cruised the streets of Kuwait City broadcasting a different kind of message. Hostilities officially ceased, cameras pan the camouflage and dust fissured faces of our GI’s high-five victory dance amid this mortuary rubble of Soviet-era tanks and personnel carriers split open as easily Cicada husks. The blackened bodies of Iraqi soldiers spill over the sides sculpted in their death throes like the museumed citizens of Pompeii. Now this soulful good feeling melts into images of armistice, the march music of John Phillips Sousa, and service men deplaning into the tearful arms of loved ones. The President basks in Congressional applause as his profile fades into patriotic fireworks Credits roll, just as the sun punches through the clouds to light my weary body, bring me back to what requires attention— the gutters, the dog’s grinning face begging for a walk, my sons’ spring practice batting woes, daughter’s unstarted science project due Monday, and the soldiers with worlds spinning beneath their eyelids as they mass for invasion along the southern border of a country that many, many rains can’t wash clean. |
