The Wars

•

Recently I went back
to my Brooklyn College reunion,”
the judge tells me,
in between calendar calls.

Mary Tavernas had put on 40 pounds.
A funny kid
named Alan Dershowitz
was now a celebrity.

In between events, I walked
down Flatbush Avenue, searching my old haunts.
I saw the soda shop that was still a soda shop,
the movie theater that was now a bakery.

At the corner of Nostrand and Flatbush,
I could hardly believe my eyes.
There was my old classmate Bobby Rabinowitz,
leafleting againt the war,
as if LBJ was still president
and we were still in college together.

“No Blood For Oil!”
he cried.
“US Out of Iraq!”

I could almost hear
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
singing the sountrack
and smell the tear gas of Chicago.

“Heh,Bobby,
do you remember me?
Some things never change!”
I said.

“Did he say hello to you, Judge?
Did he recognize you?’

“Oh, yes, he recognized me.
We had worked
on some Vietnam teach-ins
back in the day.”

“He asked how I was doing,
if I was OK with becoming a judge.”

“He said he had been a teacher
for a while and then
a clerk in a law firm,

but he kept returning
to the anti-war movement
that had opened his eyes.”

“He was always a nice guy;
nice to me, anyway.”

“Still, so much
water has flowed
under the bridge
since then:

Generation X,
Windows 95,
Ex-Soviet Union,
9/11…..

40 years later,
—Iraq now, not Vietnam—
leafletting that same
damn street corner,

it was as if he was
stuck in some kind
of time warp.”

“Well, Judge,
that is one way
to look at it,”
I say,

seeking to build
on his story,
the movement for peace
and the forks in the road,

his becoming a judge,
then stumbling
upon the land
of his long lost brother,

“Then, of course,
there is
the other way….”

“Maybe he is still out there,
picketing and protecting,
because the wars
haven’t changed…”