View From the Other Side

I. Bellevue, Ohio

There is a mass grave in Bellevue

next to the “Earth Crack,”

situated in an unassuming corner

of the local cemetery.

I needed the town historian

to tell me that,

because it is unmarked;

there’s about 70 people give or take.

Died of Cholera at the turn

of the 20th century.

Is it wrong that I want to know their names?

As it stands now

their bones peak out

through the dirt ceiling of

the caverns below.

II. My Lai

I grew up post – Vietnam

and wondered at the anger,

the seeming hysteria of protestors.

Truth be told, I never understood

the spitting, cat – calling, and the signs.

What did “baby killer” mean, anyway?

So I was shocked

when I saw those terrible photos from My Lai

under my nose all these years.

“Good Christian boys, in a horrible circumstance.”

Plugged my nose, shut my eyes, and closed my ears.

Maybe I could make it all go away.

III. The Tuskegee Experiment; denial of the Holocaust; and Imperial Avenue

Pastor Niemoeller once famously said

 “they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I am not a Jew.”

Is silence worth another thousand lashes?

Shut my mouth, silenced all talk, and built the picket fence.

The truth is I wonder if the relative affluence

of being a westerner

is some sort of curse,

perhaps it’s some sort of insulation.

I feel a great empathy

or the unknown people

lying in mass graves all over the world

whose bones have nurtured the soil,

whose deaths and lives have been denied

by the deniers of history.

And it is not just the great histories

we are in danger of denying.

Rather, it seems to me

when we forget the history at our doorstep