I waited for the afternoon newspaper to arrive,
The St. Louis Star-Times, flung like a grenade
onto our porch. I opened it to see photos of
starving P.O.W.s liberated from a prison camp
somewhere far away, on an island far away,
far away from our little house in the Heartland.
That newspaper is no longer with us, gone
like childhood, grandma, and even her Bible.
Entranced with newspapers, harbingers
of visual and verbal stimuli, I loved to look
at the photos and studied the Fronts– broken
lines and arrows in maps of the Pacific Theater.
Such a neat phrase: the Pacific Theater,
where ships and sharks jostled for attention,
and pictures of handsome young guys in
khaki uniforms caught my eye. A newspaper,
radio, and LIFE Magazine contained what
I wanted. Yet, photos die, as does a theater.
–Mary Kennan Herbert
The author’s poems have appeared in many literary and professional journals
around the world. She was the invited poet at the 60th Anniversary
World War II Conference at Siena College, in 1998.