Poetry

W. D. Ehrhart

The A’s Have It

In Anchorage, Alaska, the ack-ack guns
downed an Air America aeroplane
over the Austrian Alps, a lucky shot,
but A-okay in anybody’s book of aces,
worth a double credit A in any course
at any college in the academic world.
Alabama’s Auburn University for instance.
Nevertheless, army ants and angry aardvarks
asked, “Whatever happened to that all-
American astronaut named Armstrong?”
“As if they care,” an addled alligator
ad libbed absently while animated
armadillos ambled allegorically along
Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Or was it
Adelaide, Antarctica, or Anniston,
Argentina, Appleton, Altoona?
“All in an arctic afternoon,” said Roald
Amundsen, and he should know.
From Norway, after all. And after all
is said and done, the A’s have it. Not
the Aye’s. The A’s. The double A’s.
AA. Ask any friend of Bill’s.

W. D. Ehrhart is a Marine veteran of both the American War in Vietnam and Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His newest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems (McFarland & Co., Inc., 2019). He’s a friend of Bill W.