for vets day ---The Battle of Anacostia Flats

The Battle of Anacostia Flats
(In July of 1932, thousands of Veterans of WWI marched/encampedon Washington,D.C. demanding the ‘BONUS’ they had been promisedfor their service in the ‘Great War’.)

On steps of the Pentagon
stood MacArthur, Eisenhower and Georgie Patton.
Jackboots proudly polished and shining.
Pointing with riding crops
at men who served their nation
and would now die.

Fellow soldiers they once commanded.
Men they would now condemn.

Men exasperated by borrowed scripts of promises.

Men with families far removed from the well—to—do.

We saw these dream-starved men of the Bonus Army,
encamped in hovels and gasping for dreams
on a hot July—day of anonymous martyrs in ‘32.

Have you ever been to Washington?
Is there any monument to these veterans?
Where, in our country’s capitol,
Men were burned alive on that avenue.

Where we erect statues to those stone
faced figures,
Fiery gods-of-war who triumphed.
At least in the history books that footnote
when unarmed out-of-work men
wished for merely what was due.

Innocent countrymen sent to fight the Kaiser
who came back with horrified eyes.

Throats burned by poison fumes of hater
gasping in an air of lost consciousness.
Not from tear—gas cannisters, but from betrayal.
A generation of patriots lost stuck like flies in the residue
of supposed military greatness as future American—heroes ordered tanks
and squadrons of cavalry, sabres drawn,
to rout villainous desperados in a dreadful hour
which demanded blood, that hot July day of ‘32.
And yes, on that day, there were men stabbed
straight through.

And when you go to Washington
will you remember what we’ve done?

How we repaid those forgotten few.
How our country was wounded in spirit.
How we made war upon each other.
How ten thousand men cried.
How a nation of guns and swords,
was renewed in blood on that July day of ‘32.