Then David took hold on his clothes, and rent them;
they mourned and wept and fasted for Saul
and for Jonathan his son, and for the people
of the LORD and for the house of Israel;
because they had fallen by the sword.

The war in Lebanon seemed removed
in 82. We munched Cheetos
in the States, grew more
complacent to news reports:
the P.L.O., olive-drab Israeli
soldiers hunched in alleys,
the rat-at-tat-tat of uzis
recoiling at a windowframe.
My father wrung his hands,
opened letters slowly,
with excruciating care;
some relative might be gone,
his arms blown off by a car bomb,
helmet lying in an unreported
corner of Beirut.
                            In 1967,
it was summer, and a letter
threw us into wild packing. Sick
with whooping cough, I flew,
dreaming of war's end, dancers
in the street crowding
to Jerusalem. Father stayed
sullen, bearded, hung around my
grandmother's house, prayed
at daybreak, noon, and night.
In the steamy tropic weather
of a childhood sun, my cousin
Gil, a wild Sabra, tan,
indignant, black-curled, tougher
than a turtle's shell, ran
around the farm, felled apricots
with a broomhandle. We peeled them,
ate the plush fur first, then
the sweet-sticky meat.
We spooked cows,
                                chickens,
tossed peach-pits at Arab
peddlers, exploded
caps with any rock big enough
to make a bang, poked holes
in the screen door with a stick
to let the flies in, then hid,
ashamed, crawling crab-like
beneath the porch, our legs
quivering in the dark hole,
wooden guns clenched for the first
sign of Grandma's hissing
and hopping like a grouchy goose.
Boy-soldiers for ever we aimed
copper barrels of our not-uzis
when we heard her door
                                         slam.
Drilled in the dirt, two army
helmets, slightly buried, woven
with a spider's cheese-cloth
through the webbings were our
booty. We scurried to the vacant
lot, helmets wobbling, and dove
into the hot dust, un-gunfire
and un-grenades exploding
in our ears, past Arabs who poked
their heads over the sand
dunes like bob-o-links
through clouds of puffballs.

My father's face aged when we
dug up his helmet, brought memory
searing out of the dark hole
like a sunburn touched for the first
time. In hot July, we
garnered scars: my first battle
with a prickly pear, with war,
my father's alien heart.

Fifteen years pass blindingly on T.V.,
another war, another flight. When
will they come for us, blowing
the ram's horn of battle? Whose hands
will serve the spiny fruit in our
helmet's upturned hole?
                                        Trucks and jeeps
returning from Lebanon have orange
tarps draped over their hoods so
the F-16?s won?t wipe them out,
an indignant boy next to me
in the bus says. His eyes fix
on a soldier's gun across
the aisle. Blunt copper
bulletheads peek from its clip,
catch the crimson sunset's drip
through windowshades like blood.
He?s going to play soldier,
to taste the pit of his
innocence roll sweetly into his
stomach. Can you see him,
helmet wobbling, wounded knees
scraping through the dust? He
beckons us away from our family's
call:
            Come home now.
            Come home.

I get off the bus where rigid ranks of stars
hammered in grass line up like boys
at the ready; holes of our symbol
stretch distant as cornrows.
Here's where I find you Gil, no
longer running, no black hair
laughing down the apricot tree.
How soon war opened its arms
to you cousin, lowered you
below our house, the taste
of glory prickly
in our mouths like cactus.

"In the Dark Hole, Playing Soldier" appeared in the 1990 issue of PikeStaff Forum.