Thy Will Be Done or This Constant Rain
Saturated like drowning in a sea,
The heavy rain, blinding, he was swept, arms flailing
Like a strong tree forced by the irrepressible force of the storm
But he was just a soldier in from the field
Lost in the city, he had never come to Saigon,
But having lost his hat, now with hair plastered
Recovering from something doubtlessly poured into his glass
But where, he had no direction or sense of where he had been.
He had a brother somewhere in the city, Mateo,
Or Mat, as he was called, he the lucky one ended in Saigon,
Stood up at Long Binh behind a stake, by last name
In the dark night in on Air America, then a bus ride, wire-meshed windows,
Other eleven with the same last name scattered over a Vietnam landscape,
On lonely outposts, small garrisons, into dense hill country,
Onto muddy, dirty firebases, but my brother, he thought, ends up here,
In this city where I am lost, muddied again, having fallen
Behind an abandoned, broken cyclo.
What determines where a young man, a man now,
Will end up, in a Saigon of fumes, car horns, grinding gears,
Girls shouting from doorways, glittery signs from bars,
Sandbagged towers with machineguns, Vietnamese soldiers
With no swagger, and other Americans coming home
From bars, and here I am, he thinks, could follow them somewhere,
For a bowl of rice and fish soup, I am struggling to walk,
Where am I? How long have I been gone? Where is my unit?
What was in my drink? How long will it be? Will this constant rain
Never stop?
______________
Zeke Sanchez
Review by Dave Mehler
The speaker is a man under siege, from the elements, in a foreign hostile land and city he is unfamiliar with, in this case Saigon, during the Vietnam War. He’s blinded, has lost his hat and footing, has gotten drunk or been unknowingly drugged or poisoned, disoriented without a proper sense of direction, muddied, lost. He reflects that a brother has either been to the city or is still there somewhere unknown, while he is vulnerable amidst a chaos of cacophonous city sounds where those around him want to kill him, rob him or mean some other kind of harm. While others are returning home, he (with no swagger) but stumbling, asks himself (because he is alone while surrounded):
Where am I? How long have I been gone? Where is my unit?
What was in my drink? How long will it be? Will this constant rain
Never stop?
We as readers are offered a glimpse of Hell, reinforced by purposely delivered staccato syntax and incomplete series of clauses mimicking the speaker’s sense of dislocation and disorientation. This is a masterful war poem in which the reader is drawn in and can’t help but experience the horror of the situation.