The Deserting Fire Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The helicopters are going down all over Laos,
Like fireflies of self immolation, like Buddhists in flying rickshaws....
The war started by a dead Catholic president, the only one:
The good kid, the alter boy- The first on his street to share his ice-cream:
Where the airboys fell like plastic toys winged with
Burning paper-
The jungle gives its venomous testimonials amidst the smoldering
Pyres: the ancient slang biting the wrists of poor boys
From Kentucky- The freed slaves are turning red in
The dripping lungs of the banyans-
Romeo and Juliet are playing dead for the Viet Kong digging
Their tunnels as equal to rats as equal to ants:

Out in the sun, and the blue playground,
I had a good day, I said to her eyes, as her eyes smiled
Like full bellies naked and pregnant amidst the smoldering sugarcane:
Letting the black ants crawl around her navel, because they only tickle
Tickle, tickle, like tongues, like hands all over her....
And the bodies’ insouciant fawns, pistils erect in the unwrapped petals,
Her dripping sweat in a sauna of unrefined sugars....

There is a line of footprints which disappears from us,
Away from where they are taking the moaning bodies to the river,
Where the jungle opens like a cut throat, like another poisoned mouth
Beneath the moaning one,
And perhaps Vivaldi is play a retreat, as the whirling blades
Fireball the impressive death, the exploded canons over
The fort of imploding air and ruined habits of metal,
Where the children of mud defeat a god of full-blown cash money....

And then the sad rivers are invisible,
As I lay my hand open her belly, and she is a vase full of unspilt water,
And there is a bee digging into the corner of her smiling lips,
In her closed eyes a prayer for pollination out of the deserting fire.