Poem
Trudell, Dennis
Poem Age 92 My father wouldn't watch the war in Iraq as he was dying. He didn't want television on that first week in the hospital, the week at a nursing home, the week back in the same hospital...
...Wish I'd had nothing to do with that: war," he said more than once as he was saying his goodbyes...
...he was there during Pearl Harbor...
...That war helped them buy a home, then another, larger house in a suburb-and my father who hadn't graduated from high school sent two sons to private colleges...
...He had designed tails and cockpits of fighter planes for Curtiss-Wright Aircraft during World War II...
...Spring 2003 -Dennis Trudell Dennis Trudell is the author of "Fragments in Us: Recent & Earlier Poems," which won the Felix Pollack Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press...
...He'd been sent to England in 1941 to help oversee the assembling of planes Curtiss shipped there by convoy...
...He lives in Madison, Wisconsin...
...his regret about a war that helped pay for me beginning to learn we are all combatants...
...I have a memory of air-mail stationery and my mother reading his words for me...
...All losing...
...I passed television images of bombing and tanks, desert fatigues, rubble on my way to and from his shrinking weight, his grin without dentures, his gasps to breathe...
...He is also the editor of "Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball...
...He didn't want television on that first week in the hospital, the week at a nursing home, the week back in the same hospital room, those last five days before eternity at another nursing home...
...I rode a bus for eighteen hours to march against this Iraq war before my father's inability to swallow led to a final mattress, on a floor with alarm because he kept struggling off it as his brain was ending...
Vol. 70 • April 2006 • No. 4
