Poetry

W. D. Ehrhart

In the Midst of the Peaceable Kingdom

                                                                                          George School
                                                                                                  (long ago, but still
                                                                                                  not long enough)

My memories of that place
are mostly anything but good.
An oxymoron: Quaker institution.
All the right—the righteous—words,
a piece of the Peaceable Kingdom,
but just another institution in the end:
hypocritical, duplicitous, all smiles.
“Speak truth to power,” but we don’t
mean us; we’re not the ones we mean.
Just eat the shit we feed you;
don’t complain, or call it what it is.

But one cold night in January,
snow began to fall. At two a.m.,
my wife and I got out of bed and dressed
and went outside and started walking;
walked and walked through foot-deep snow
through woods so still, so empty
we could almost think we were the last
two people in the whole wide world;
so quiet, when we stopped to listen,
we could hear the snowflakes
falling on the snowy forest floor.

W. D. Ehrhart’s newest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Co., 2019. McFarland will also re-issue his memoir, Busted: A Vietnam Veteran in Nixon’s America, in 2021.