POLITICAL Poem: Counting Mines, by Steven Gillis

In Vietnam,
there are three million mines,
cluster bombs, etc.
A rose by any other name
will ruin a limb, after all.
Perhaps a few less,
as this report
is more than five years old…

To count to three million,
would take more than a month,
more than a mouth
full of empty numbers
could bear, and only
if this mouth should
never sleep.

The mines sleep, covering
eighty percent of what we
called the DMZ back in 1969,
the year after Tet, when the war
changed tides like a moonless
jungle river. They sleep,
holding buried nightmares
for farmers to unearth,
for wandering foot to find.

In Cambodia,
they have their own legacy
grown from lost limbs
and shattered families.
They shared that blurred
border jungle States endured,
before the satellites
came to measure each meter
with relativistic precision.

 
Cambodia,
had Khmer Rouge,
and the split it left
behind. With one
sleepless mouth,
they may have six months
of counted mines,
and one in five rural
villages or more, still
hold that secret fire.
Unlikely heroes have emerged,
heroes that have crawled
paw in hand with humanity,
bringing plague and horror
in their many billions, for many
thousands of wandering years.
The rats, in all their brilliant
evolutionary turns,
each run through
maze’s muddle, have become
smarter than many would
like to admit.

They can be trained,
to smell a mine, or bomb
beneath the soil.
Being small, they
do not evoke the demons
trapped beneath. Magawa,
was retired after five years
and one-hundred-and-nine
successes. Earning a medal
for his efforts.

If he lived forever,
if he worked forever,
if we had the time,
if we had the will,
in 250,000 years or so,
give or take, the task
could be done. But even
sized for a rat, 55,000
medals may be too
much weight to bear.