a Poem by Grady Chambers

Stopping the War

The most I ever did to stop it
was walk through Chicago carrying a comet
on a piece of cardboard.

It was winter; our grim procession flowed
through the frozen city.
And under the spark and arc

of the comet’s flaking tail
was Nelson Mandela’s face,
digitally shifted

so tears streamed from his cheekbones
in the colors of the flag.

Is it possible I wanted peace?
I was sixteen—joysticked missiles
flashed greenly
into Baghdad.

I kept the sign
because I liked the comet.
I stayed up late
watching night-vision raids.
I wanted us to win.

*
More than lying to our parents,
more than Saturday nights
in the lot behind Allied

doing moon-bounds
down the lengths of metal sheeting,
better than tequila and Spanish Audrey

pulling me toward her
downward
onto her older sister’s foldout bed,

were Fridays, 3:00 p.m.,
Ian, me, and Ryan
in the Demon Dog parking lot,
soft-pack Parliaments
and a half pint of Seagram’s on the dash.
I liked how Ryan drove—fast,

but I trusted it,
like the car was a part of him—
I liked how he’d be halfway through the Seagram’s
while me and Ian
still had a half period left of Geometry.

We’d eat Polishes in the parking lot
with our backpacks stashed in his car.
We’d watch the sparks shatter
from the tracks of the Elevated
each time the Red Line
screamed past.

*
At the dinner table
my mother passed out pins
with the image of a gas-masked soldier
locked behind a peace sign—

in room 402
I was put on trial for war crimes
in Rwanda
in a history class imagined
as the Tanzanian courtroom
used in 1995
for the UN tribunal
on genocide—

Sundays I walked the path past
Belmont Harbor
to the stone atrium
overlooking the lake.

Geese screamed. Crushed cans
drifted by the inlet.
I came for the way the line

between water and sky just
collapsed as the light fell to one
pale wall of pewter and blue;
to see the beacons glow red
on the stone shoulders
of the grey intake tower standing
like a stanchion in the deep.

*
There’s a poem where the protesters know each other
by their missing little fingers, sawed off in dissent
and mailed to the president.

I like that thought: hoses, marches, leashes and teeth,
ten thousand pinkies piled on a desk—

then years later, two strangers
meeting in Michigan or Warsaw
or the fog of a lakeside park: pine in winter,

hand on a bench-back, hand brushing back
a strand of hair: no wars for forty years.
Two ex-dissidents flashing their gaps in recognition.

*
Late spring we won State.
On television, tanks
with chain-wrapped wheels

under giant crossing sabers
in Grand Festivities Square,
Baghdad.

At home I clicked through pictures
of those 1960s Saigon monks—bone thin
in sunlight, in saffron
robes, in the center of an intersection,
their friends pouring petrol on their heads

before the men pressed their foreheads to the pavement,
then struck and touched their bodies with a match.

The swirling shapes of flame
around their torsos made me think
how ice cream twists from a machine

into a waiting cone.
They pinned their robes so closely
they became impossible to save.

*
And they didn’t want saving,
they wanted to make a point,

like my mother, in 1968,
lacing seventy-five nails
through a tennis ball

and placing it
beneath a cop car’s
front wheel.

Khe Sanh. Kent State. Daley
in the mayor’s hall. She had chopped black hair
and plain white sneakers.

Ninh Binh. Blue water
and bombers coming off the shore.
My mother kneeling beside the wheel. Bang
when it rolled.

*
You can go to war and come back
missing half a face.
You can send a drone to Pakistan

and open up the insides of a hospital
full of children. You might return alive
but with a stripe of filmstrip in your brain

shining with something living
while it burns.

Nevertheless, when Ryan enlisted I was excited.
A friend in the army. I liked how it sounded.
I liked the world I pictured it building

in the mind of anyone I’d tell—gunfire and winter,
childhoods of trash can barbecues,
fake metal of a Remington replica swapped

for the grip and raised block script
of a handgun
hanging easy from a muscled waist,
some imagined toughness reflected back to me.

I shaved my head.
He went through basic.
I went to college.
He landed in Afghanistan.
I carried a duffel,
I let a woman in an airport shake my hand
and thank me for my service.

*
Some days I ride the El
all evening through Chicago’s downtown
loop, past the campuses and stone

lions and libraries and fireproofed brick-
backed dominions where inside
the business of the city

spins like a turnstile. There’s the fountain
where kids toss pennies
for a wish. There’s the convention center

where the Democrats gathered in 1968.
There’s the park where my mother was billy-clubbed
and teargassed with the rest of them.

There’s that strip
off the Kennedy Expressway
which meant nothing

until I read that activist
Malachi Ritscher burned himself to death in protest,
circa November 2006.

To which the newspapers said,
“With all great respect,
his last gesture on this planet
was his saddest, and most futile.”

*
How does a war end? With airlifts and crowds
amassing at the gate; elsewhere soldiers
stripping gear from their shoulders and diving
headlong     star-splayed     Geronimo     down
into Ha Long Bay. With a banner 

on an airship claiming victory,
the war still going. In Buffalo,
Gary, south Chicago, with kids

doing benzos in the alley
outside the strip mall; in emerald green
on the day of the parade;

with the outline of Illinois
tattooed on Ryan’s bicep
the summer he came back, a red star

inked inside the center of the state.

*
Honor to the writers of the Great Manifestos,
the pens of the addled visionaries
scribbling missives for peace.

Honor to my mother,
who fights for the long arc, believing it bends
toward justice.

Honor to Ryan, who knows the patterns
cast on a sandstone wall
when the head of a leaping dog
opens for a bullet—

I am thankful he came back.

And honor to Chicago, the steel blue
of the lake one winter afternoon
glimpsed from the window of a train—

where I angled my cardboard Mandela
so everyone could see what I stood for;
where outside

the city passed in a scramble
of ductwork and water-holds
and rusted metal mushroom turbines

turning with the wind;
and a vacant lot
where someone had spray-painted a bomber

inside a giant circle: red wings, black tail
spread to the circle’s edge,
making the sign for peace.

Which I looked at. Which I put here
because I thought it pretty,
and because it felt significant,
and because I remember.