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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2002 : Ginny Lowe Connors
GIVE ME TOMORROW
"They were in their 20s but might have been 100. In answer to my idiot question,
'If I were God, what would you want for Christmas,' one tried to answer and failed until,
looking into that unpromising sky, he said, 'Give me tomorrow.'" - David Douglas Duncan, about American soldiers in the Korean War.
Their documents insist: eighteen,
twenty, twenty-four.
But soldiers are ageless.
Once introduced to death, they drop
their ages like quarters
into parking meters, into streets,
into machines that tumble clothes,
rinsing evidence away.
Dirt smudges their faces
the way blood soaks into the ground
and remains, a darker dirt
glistening in the pale light of moon.
Their eyes burn
with a bright darkness,
collapsed stars
in the voids of their faces.
Sometimes they hear nothing
but a single high, keening note
which tries to drown out memory.
When they hear screaming,
they clamp their lips shut.
They try to become stones.
Like fireworks, fear blossoms
so often they hardly notice
after the first deafening booms.
Smoke spiders crawl after them
into ditches, into dreams.
On orders, they go forward,
they retreat. They carry
letters folded over their hearts,
maps to an innocent country.
Although today
forced them to remember hell,
to recognize hell, to believe
in hell, the only thing they ask for
is tomorrow. The sky
promises nothing, yet they pray:
Give me tomorrow.
This poem won an Honorable Mention in the 2002 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author Ginny Lowe Connors received a $50 award. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Ginny Lowe Connors
Ginny Lowe Connors' poetry has appeared in many journals and anthologies.
Her recent awards include first prize in the 2001 Atlanta
Review International Poetry Competition,
first prize in Connecticut Poetry Society's Walter Winchell Poetry Contest,
and first prize in the Rising Sun Nature Poetry Contest. "Give Me Tomorrow" has appeared in The Connecticut River Review.
Ms. Connors, an English teacher in West Hartford, Conn., is also the editor of several poetry anthologies:
Essential Love: Poems About Mothers and Fathers, Daughters
and Sons (2000),
To
Love One Another: Poems Celebrating Marriage (2002) and
Proposing
on the Brooklyn Bridge: Poems About Marriage (2003).
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