Forgetting To Ask Why (An American Lament) Poem by Frank Bana

These dollar bills, dead personage revered
While men who asked the future fell
And do not show their faces here, nor at Rushmore -
Dangerous to whom, and how, whose money on the bullets
That tore their brains apart? Airports of exhaustion
Choked by sleek metallic hulks, and boulevards
Carry the caskets of their names, In Memoriam.

This nation, vast and vulnerable in wealth
Allows its memory to recede, faster than strength
As if heroes, assets could be fixed, wasting instead
In wars of folly, self-justified and made (and what was staged
In Tonkin; when was made, the decision to invade?)
Forgetting to ask why, like a pachyderm self-blinded
In the changed, rotating maelstrom of the world.

Old bridges are eroding, with no constructive will
The past is redefined by instant new design
The causes of amnesia and neglect
Run deep as well as proximate. And those who must forget
And lose the good part of their mind had best store up
Goodwill on which they can rely. Why the pursuit
Of happiness among the many idols to pursue:
Like justice, righteousness; like evidence and truth?

In times teased by disaster, forgetting will not do.