{"id":5935,"date":"2010-06-01T09:17:59","date_gmt":"2010-06-01T09:17:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5935"},"modified":"2011-05-14T21:53:15","modified_gmt":"2011-05-14T21:53:15","slug":"memorial-day-belmont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5935","title":{"rendered":"Memorial Day, Belmont"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Shaw&#8217;s father wanted no monument<br \/>\nexcept the ditch,<br \/>\nwhere his son&#8217;s body was thrown<br \/>\nand lost with his &#8220;niggers.&#8221;<br \/>\n&#8211;Robert Lowell, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poemhunter.com\/poem\/for-the-union-dead\/\">For the Union Dead<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The VFW Commander in his flat Boston voice<br \/>\nintones the names of the dead:<br \/>\nDeStefano, Haratoonian, Donnelly, O&#8217;Neil.<br \/>\nSweating, Buddha-fat babies watch; their<br \/>\nshrunken grandmas sag into low lawn chairs.<br \/>\nThe high school band follows the route we have<br \/>\nmarked for them. They play like experts, but they can joke,<br \/>\nknowing they have a few years before they sink<br \/>\ninto the chairs along the way.<br \/>\nIn this town, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poemhunter.com\/poem\/waking-in-the-blue\">Lowell<\/a> checked himself in<br \/>\nto the loony bin<br \/>\nand glimpsed his future in the faces<br \/>\nof the other mental cases.<br \/>\n(Plath too, and Ray Charles.)<br \/>\nOnce John Birch HQ, it knows fear.<br \/>\nCambridge public housing blocks stand in sight: warnings.<br \/>\nThe lady selling cones from the ice cream truck<br \/>\nwears a hijab. Belmont&#8217;s Finest march to the tune<br \/>\nof <em>Valley Forge, Custer&#8217;s ranks,<\/em><br \/>\n<em>San Juan Hill and Patton&#8217;s tanks.<\/em><br \/>\nAnd the ditch, it comes closer each year.<br \/>\nBlank shots over the town&#8217;s war graves.<br \/>\nThe bones hear nothing, but the shots and smoke<br \/>\nare for the grandmas, the band, the babies,<br \/>\nfor the ravaged veterans of the one war<br \/>\nwe all fight alone to the last breath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shaw&#8217;s father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son&#8217;s body was thrown and lost with his &#8220;niggers.&#8221; &#8211;Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead The VFW Commander in his flat Boston voice intones the names of the dead: DeStefano, Haratoonian, Donnelly, O&#8217;Neil. Sweating, Buddha-fat babies watch; their shrunken grandmas sag into low lawn chairs. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-verse-and-worse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5935"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6184,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5935\/revisions\/6184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}