Just 19, I was ferried through the desert
in a copter, where we worried that the eternal sands
of this enemy’s land would choke the intakes.

I had prepared for this,
sharpened my shooting eye,
learned to clean, assemble and disassemble,
mastered the correct hold
to choke the air intake of the enemy, to bring death.

Honed my physique,
fine tuned my body to pain,
practiced war games on the video screens,
bonded with these comrades
with whom I would shortly alight.

Now as we step onto the battle field
I am taken aback by the immediacy
of the enemy’s onslaught.
I had worried about how it would feel
the first time -

But found there was no time to feel – or think.
Instinct and reflex governed.

I simply killed for you.

Ray Brown

In silence and dignity
at 17:00 hours
while the sun
sets in the west
they lower the flag
marking the entrance
to the Veterans Cemetery
in Virginia.

Again in Missouri
then Nebraska
throughout the broad expanse
of these States
whose stars mark the
meaning of the moment.

Below the earth for
which they gave their lives
they lie
from whose blood
springs forth
our steps
to American Freedom.

At the Tomb of One
Unknown – except for his sacrifice -
Sentinels move in steady rhythmic pace
and every thirty minutes
salute these fallen nameless comrades
another silent,
and in the darkness of the night,
unseen tribute
to those who today,
we honor as having
come home.

Ray Brown

On his lapel, stood pins of distinction.

Signaling fame, however ephemeral

cast in the communality of the iron of endurance

bred by those who walked before him.

He did not know them.

In fact, many have long since been forgotten.

As will he, when his pins are left discarded

in a tiny felt lined box

in the attics of memory

where the nuisances of unimportance

are moved with a shambling gate

from one corner to another.

Then one day, the curiosity of youth stumbled upon the box –

Blew the dust into the air, opened the lid

and aired the memories of forgotten ideals

cast aside by the arrogant certainty of purpose,

so much a part of the youth’s father.

The grandson’s eyes lit up with undoubting gleam –

the brilliance of hope – of endurance beyond adversity.

He grasped the pins and wore them to school the next day –

and into the school yard.

From thence, he set his course as if for mankind

to achieve some deed beyond his means.

As he grew, he treasured those ideals and pins.

Walked steadfast in his grandfather’s footsteps with pride.

For humanity he eventually touched this terrestrial sphere ever so

perceptibly.

When he breathed his last sigh, they placed the pins on his lapel

and put a folded flag at his fingertips.

Before they closed the lid, his son removed the pins –

and they gave him the flag.

And – as was the custom – with complacent smugness and disdain,

The pins were thereafter sold at the next garage sale.

Ray Brown

As I yawned my thoughts escaped me.

Involuntarily trapped within my wishful thinking,

I’d kept them prisoners, lest my companions

appreciate I was someplace else.

Now summoned by my boredom,

some audible phrase of 3 to 4 words

left my brain and ventured into the airways of human discourse

to be treated disdainfully by my associates,

adsorbed in their own words –

startled by my yawn to begin with.

Having intentionally been ignored

my thoughts travelled on the words,

through the air,

as if on the foot of a carrier pigeon.

On the way, they found shelter from a storm

within the beams of a barn

atop a field of once cut hay,

where he reached up before the pigeon could alight

and grasped the words within his calloused hands,

and contemplated the thoughts

as he directed the horses of the hay wagon

through the hillside fields, now fallow –

Where the thoughts were lost as he,

unloaded the bales onto the stack.

And somewhere in the farm fields of Iowa,

My thoughts lie crushed between two bales.

Fodder for a mushroom farm in the adjacent county.

Ray Brown

Joe mooned the audience at the Open Mic reading
the other night at the Millburn, NJ Library.
I knew he had it in him,
I was just hoping that I would never see it.

Joe always complained
about the “Intelligentsia” in the poetry world.
We would go to workshops,
they would give him some mundane topic
and expect that he would write in esoteric terms
that not even a swami could interpret.

“These people would expect lyrical phases
even if the topic was to write about a fart,”
he told me once.
“Some things are just what they are,
and they aren’t lyrical.”

So when he read his poem at the library
about the outhouse
that was on the Western Pennsylvania farm where he grew up
he started to hear some snickers
saw those condescending smiles in the audience
like “here goes Joe again,”
and all of his William Paterson College A.A. bred inhibitions
broke down, he just lost it.
There at the podium he mooned them,
and that just about said it all,
but it didn’t really.

For you see, if certain writers who were acceptable to
the Intelligentsia had done that, it would have been innovative,
avant-garde. They would have put his picture
on the wall at Poets House in New York
written about it in Poets and Writers Magazine.
But Joe had the wrong initials behind his name -
A.A. instead of M.F.A.

So now as we have a beer at Mechlin’s Corner Tavern
Joe asked me about the old poetry haunts
and Mrs. Snooty who black listed him.

Afterwards he jumps into his chauffeured driven limousine,
he now having become quite the cult idol,
much sought after reader,
with his own booking agent, traveling first class
from college to college throughout the United States.

That’s what one minute of fame, on You Tube,
“Mooning the Intelligentsia”, can do for you.

Ray Brown

Jake Austin is an 8th Grade student from California.  He also reads my poetry.  His school assignment was to do a report about a poet (he chose to write about me) and write poetry.  I am proud to post his poem, “Cars”, below.

Cars

Cars Cars everywhere there’s cars

Small cars big cars

Skinny cars fat cars

My favorite cars fast cars

Not slow cars or race cars

Street cars or old cars

And not many new cars

I don’t like expensive cars 

I don’t like cheap cars 

I like a nice running fast car

My favorite car is the 1970 Dodge Challenger

I like it because it’s fast

And I like it because it’s full of DANGER

Jake Austin

California

My recent poem, “What Progress Has Wrought”, has been accepted for publication in the Australian Magazine, FreeXpresSion. My thanks to Editor Peter F. Pike for appreciating this poem.

“What Progress Has Wrought” tracks the saga of an anthropology Professor from Princeton University who spent 30 months working in the Australian outback with an aboriginal tribe. He returns to New Jersey and is fined by the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife for picking up a dead deer along the roadside which has been struck by another car – and using it for meat and to fashion some boots and a satchel for his own use.

FreeXpresSion - http://www.freexpression.net/ 

If you are interested in following my work, considering joining my Facebook Fan Page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ray-Brown/93692175185

Thank you.

Ray B-

In tribute to Le Roy “Lee” Hammer
Livingston, NJ

1920-2006

The lady from down the street,
when I meet her someplace
an elementary school friend
asked about him. 

“He always had his baseball uniform on”, 

“Day and night as we played in the neighborhood
it was a part of him
as much as his hands,” 

“I wondered whether he slept in it,”. 

Baseball.
His was a generation of baseball.
A generation that traded cards
and then their uniforms – for those of their Country
while their mothers cried at home
whenever they looked in their closets— 

They played pickup games while waiting to ship out
nap sacks as bases
then cleaned up for horrors so bleak
that they returned to never talk about it,
used silent hand signals from the bench
known only to each other
and not those in the stands. 

He took stenographic notes
of the trials of those who ran the wrong way
then faced firing squads for the sake of the team
cried at night –
although baseball players are not supposed to cry. 

He returned to become a Livingston, NJ diamond
coached Legion Ball and taught boys of summer
how to become men, face life,
and use the correct parts of speech. 

After the field, the Legion Hall was his third base
an unspoken fraternity where they sat
wondered without saying
what they had been through
still balked about talking about it,
even to each other,
watched the Yankees and listened to Mel Allen

- he waited for when the Pirates were in town.

I wish I could have been there
instead of a safety patrol for the school bus
in Baptistown, New Jersey when
in the 60’s series
Virdon’s ball hit a little stone
popped the Adam’s Apple in Kubek’s tree,
then Mazeroski smashed one over the fence.
I cried – though I am sure he had that wry little smile
of satisfaction, one of the few times the Pirates
lived up to their name and stole something. 

“So, did you ever hear about the golfer
who needed two pair of pants
in case he got a ‘hole in one’?”,
he asked the first time he meet me. 

Those that he touched
filed past
knowing that like the cowboys of old,
he, for certain,
died with his spikes on.

Ray Brown

All of his life he had just been hoping
to catch a foul ball off of a Phillies’ bat.
As a kid he remembers sitting
in Section 514, with his Pop,
and watching a boy his age, in 218,
make a clean catch, one off Rose’s bat
no bunch of other little pack-rats,
scrabbling around in the seats for a loose ball,
a perfect form catch
like he had been taught to make in right field. 

All these years, nothing had come even close.
Hey, what’s the probability anyway?
He knew the statistics, just
like he recalculated each Phillies’ batting average
after the games. 

There was once when his Pop and he
sat in the first row of the Upper Deck,
the ball came sailing towards them
and he knew, that if he reached over the railing,
stretched as far as his small frame
would permit, that he could have had a chance
to catch it, but he was intimidated by that railing,
and the height. Only tepidly extended his arm
and just missed. 

Today, 20 years later, his Pop is gone
he sat with his 3 year old daughter
who wore a pink baseball cap.
He was sharing his memories with her -
and making her own,
when all of a sudden, he heard the crack
looked up and saw the ball heading his way
no time to put on his glove, which he still carried with him.
He reached up and made a fatherly, bare
handed catch. He knew inside his heart
that this should mean as much to her, as to him.
She would be waiting for this he was sure
the way he had all his life.
His long time dream reached. 

He took the prize and shared it with her
handing it over.
She turned, wanting to please her Pop
the same way a catch by him
would have swelled up pride in his own dad,
and with one mighty heave
tossed the ball back onto the field. 

One, not a father, might have wondered about
this frustrating moment, unexpected turn.
A lifetime dream lost, irretrievably.
He, in fact, was proud,
hugged her to make this moment his own,
the joy in her face – proving to her Pop
that she could do it, was all that he needed -
from the Ball that Got Away.

Ray Brown

The worries of the next arise from their daytime germination.

Content in the parched earth,

having awaited their opportunity,

now entwined in the synapses

until, like weeds in a garden

they choke out the rich hues of the evening sunset

shadowing the golden yellow flowers.

At the end of the day…

One last chance to pull the sprouts emerging from the seeds of doubt

before their tentacles root,

choking out the dainty fingers of the flowers

which held on during the long day.

The beating noontime sun having sapped their strength,

now having breath a sigh, wearied…

reaching the oasis of evening.

At the end of the day…

The weeds bundled and tied.

He splashed some tepid water from the barrel on his face

and then trod wearily through the door of inner self,

seeking solace in his bed — and comfort for his mind.

While in the garden his next day worries sprouted once again,

At the end of the day…

Ray Brown