May Fourth, In Memoriam Poem by Denis Mair

May Fourth happened twenty miles from me,
That's what brought the war home.
My high school friend got shot in the back,
That's when it hit me that there was a war.

Dean Kahler was a Mennonite who grew up on a farm;
We understood each other; we were the only two
Who reminded everyone in our civics class
That the Vietnamese didn't want us on their soil.
He served two years as a conscientious objector,
Worked in a hospital, got himself a Japanese girlfriend.

Then Dean went to Kent State, took classes at the main campus.
There was a pulse beating there, at the forefront of the times,
The James Gang played at bars on Water Street,
The young professors were radical and involved.
I went to a branch campus, an overgrown high-school;
I didn't know what Main Campus had been up to
To get itself occupied by the National Guard;
Local papers didn't do much to clue us in;
The authorities were keeping the war contained.
I'm afraid I was off in my own world,
I went off camping while classes were canceled,
Smoking marijuana alone in the woods,
Getting swallowed up in green solitude.
But then I thumbed a ride home from the State Forest
And the state employee who picked me up said,
"They killed some demonstrators in Kent, it's about time, "
And I kept quiet until we got to Canton.
Later I saw the pictures, Guardsman dressed in combat gear,
As if they had gone in to clear out a jungle village,
They charged around campus in snouted masks,
The war had finally escaped from its jar.
Dean Kahler was shot,320 feet from the Guardsmen,
As he watched from the edge of the Commons,
He had turned to run at the sound of gunfire.
The Guardsmen had a line of fire downhill
When they killed Allison at the base of the knoll.
No stray bullet severed Dean Kahler's spine.
It had to be a trajectory of hate, peppering the crowd
To let all the demonstrators know
What bad-assed killing machines they were.
That was when everything became serious,
That shocked me into to wanting to know the reasons:
Ohio was not just a place of rolling cornfields;
The corn of Ohio had raised two kinds of people,
And one kind hated the other.
That day the hidden death-trigger showed itself,
Who knew what could set it off again?

Dean Kahler went through some low times,
Hooked up to tubes in his bed,
But he was made of something strong,
His face was not made to glower with hatred.
With the settlement money he bought himself a car
With a gas pedal on the steering column.
He visited the families of the dead;
He formed a network of survivors;
He gathered archives about the shooting
For the university where he was shot.
He kept demonstrating against the war.
He gave up his plan to go to Japan.
He drove around the state, an activist for the handicapped.
He found a new girlfriend, he finished his degree.
He played wheelchair basketball,
He collected music, played tapes of Leonard Cohen;
How he could keep from being swamped by negativity,
Sitting in that wheelchair hearing music
That went straight to the chasm of the soul?
But he charged ahead and collected friends,
He settled down in Athens County:
That was Ohio's own little corner of Appalachian anarchy.
He was always at a downtown tavern on Friday afternoons,
Presiding at beery social gatherings near the Courthouse.
He knew the professors at the college
And dope growers who lived in the hills.
The locals embraced him as one of their own
And ended up electing him County Commissioner.
I went for a visit, and he took me to his haunts
I came away thinking, maybe his body had been shattered,
But his spirit was more whole than mine.