Two Poems

From The Western Socialist #5, 1967

The Hungry Eagle 

Vietnam is not the eagle's only foe:

You try to set a limit to his needs —

The sons you feed him make his talons grow.

Hatched from workers' graves, he perches now

On arms that pet him while they fear his speeds;

Vietnam it not the eagle‘s only foe.

The death he spatters on the ground is slow. 

His human food lies thrashing in the reeds, 

The sons you feed him make his talons grow.

The eggs he saves have fire still to throw. 

His butane beak is sharper than his greeds; 

Vietnam is not the eagle's only foe.

You watch his wings above your home. and know

He never spirals near but what he feeds. 

The sons you feed him make his talons grow.

The meek are looking for a place to go. 

The rebels fight, the harbor statue bleeds; 

Vietnam it not the eagle's only foes; 

The time you feed him makes his talons grow. 

Stan Blake

 

Nightmares of a Radical 

In the bottom of my Campbell soup cans 

Vietnamese orphans squabble on a trash heap

For the freedom to lick empty G.I. lint. 

From the crackle of my Dow Saran-wrap 

Flaming "targets" scream and old men weep.

A Saigon mother in my wife's sad eyes 

Whores for Marines to feed her baby girl 

My fenced yard is full of mental refugees. 

Ten thousand miles of Pacific Ocean fail 

To pacify them; nothing shuts off this newsreel.

I, a socialist, whose children salute 

The stars and stripes, whose hands exchange the buck.

Whose telephone supplies the guns we shoot, 

I try to believe I'm better than a hawk 

Because I held a sign and gave a talk.  

Stan Blake