War Baby

In this moment before birth,
I am turning,
a tiny mass of flesh/bones
struggling for the light,
my slippery cord unraveling,
my head a mess of milk white fuzz
that pushes down and through,
my wrinkled eyes sealed,
arms fingers legs
rubbery red wet.
 
My mother's family waits outside,
a Greek chorus drinking black coffee,
relieved that the labor is over.
Someone marks the time:
two-twenty-three-a-m,
and my father, half-drunk,
plays the guitar in a nightclub
somewhere in South Philly.
He does not even know,
as his callous young fingers
interpret "Stardust,"
that his first son
has been born.
 
Someone gives him the news,
buys him a drink,
while my mother,
beautiful serene sedated,
smiling like Rita Hayworth
in a pin-up picture,
cradles me with nervous sighs.
She is tended now
by hospital people
who daydream about loved ones,
fearful and faraway,
points on a fiery map.
But I am just another baby
in an era when babies are mass produced
like munitions.
 
I was conceived sometime
in the dawn of a new year,
the result of two militant lovers making up
while the rest of the world
lusts for the blood of boys
born twenty years before...
a war baby
who brings no peace.

Vernon Waring has been a newspaper reporter, feature editor, and public relations account executive. He is currently employed in the quality control department of a Philadelphia printing company. His poetry has appeared in The Writer, The Iconoclast, the Alabama School of Fine Arts Poetry Quarterly, the Midwestern University Quarterly, New Dimensions, Anthology, the South Street Star, MAYA, and the Stylus. His work has also been featured on NPR-sponsored Prairie Home Companion web site. His light verse has been published in the Saturday Evening Post and the Philadelphia Daily News.

Email: Vernon Waring

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