Earl S Braggs
Why We All Went to War
—slightly before and slightly after 1971
No choice but to listen, so we listened to the Funk
Master, himself, James Brown screaming
out from the voice of every black radio station
in North Carolina, America, “Say it loud,
I’m black and I’m proud.” But we had no pride.
We stole ours from the tables of discontent
and index pages of county public library books
never to be returned like names stolen by war
never declared on our schoolboy notebook paper.
We never believed in dates due or “Due dates.” We,
“The Chosen Ones,” were the crimes of choice,
a draft number or a prison number. Two years in
a night-jungle war or five years wearing an orange
agent jumping suit with New Hanover County
654321 stamped quite heavily by the heaviness
of heavy black letters mailed then hammered
into the black, sharp as our will not to kill yellow
Vietnam babies and children just as poor as
our pouring milk water into a cereal bowl
of rice paddy rice. Everyday evening news
was the news of a new American flag ,draped,
flying funeral shipped home. Another one of us,
colored and convicted, locked up simply for being
one of us. Locked up, out by the untranslatable
terms of conditions that applied only to us,
without schoolboy paper or proper consent
to vote not to go to prison or to a war, undeclared
shared seemingly too easily in the back rooms
of white houses up and down the long avenues of
“Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,”
merely bad, bold words written loud on pre-disco
paper floors, angry as the dance we all danced
all night long to the hot music of becoming
something more than the president, Mr Richard
Milhous Nixon, ever intended. Dawson Street,
a lonely, lively colored boy street, painted black
quite beautiful outside of the American landscape
of equal opportunity. So without further defeat, we
packed our nothingness into suitcases tied together,
said goodbye to streets, shot heroin into the vein
and voice of that protest song, said it loud, raised
a clenched black fist black power salute, kissed
mothers, turned about-face, boarded a dog bus,
army stray grey and rode all the way downtown
to The Public Library of the Republic of Vietnam
to return the library books we never did return.
