WAR Poem: Daddy’s Glass Eye, by Jenyth Gearhart

I’ll never forget Dad’s
ever-changing eyes:
blue in his Air Force tie
hazel in his Navy sailor whites
green in the camo pants
he wore in the garden
as his hoe attacked the weeds.

His hand-eye coordination was astounding:
with a hoe, a bat, or a golf club
he could hit anything
anywhere he wanted.

He could chip the golf ball
so it would land and stick,
or read a putt and curve
the ball’s roll ever so
gently into the hole –
his touch on the club
was light and elastic.

He never told me why he painted
the putter head gold,
then sprayed gold glitter on it,
or how he earned sniper gold medals.

I never saw him shoot a gun
Except in Disneyland’s Frontierland,
There, he rested the rifle on his shoulder
Squinted his eye, and pulled the trigger.
“Oh yeah!” he’d say as Goofy’s head fell over.

He wouldn’t talk about
the Japanese box full of
coins, a medallion, and a large
machine-gun bullet that showed
signs of extreme heat.

What Dad would do
Is play basketball on the driveway
teaching me to put
backspin on the ball
creating a “shooter’s bounce”.
“They had a hoop on the aircraft carrier
that picked me up,” he told us once.
Why did you get picked up?
“Kamikaze” was the only word we got out of him.

One time in the driveway when I was about nine
he started yelling, covered his eye, and
ran to the gutter, picking up something.
“My glass eye just popped out!” he said.
“Oh daddy, lemme see” I said.
He kept his fist closed, but his eyelid was
flipped up, red and gruesome.
I screamed.

“Want to see my eye, or
should I put it back?” he asked,
He turned around, pretend popped it in,
then returned to grin and grab me.
“It’s a joke from the war” he’d say,
but no more.

During his last day, I learned
-melted bullet was from the kamikaze
that strafed the ship
-it crashed into the captain’s bridge
-his ship went down
-Dad grabbed that bullet rolling down the deck
-burned his hand, jumped overboard
-swam to another chance.

So many other memories he never shared:
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Korea
Those sights are buried with him.
And the glass eye?
One of the many tricks he played
to deal with the tense boredom of
waiting for the war: shooting hoops,
hitting mythical golf balls into the Pacific,
rolling and capturing baseballs on the listing ship’s deck.

Or, maybe that glass eye
kept the horrible sights he’d seen
from leaking out of the corners
Of his memory.

-Jenyth Jo