Nemo Poems: A Martian Perspective

Poems from a young American soldier in Vietnam; Perspectives from time and place.

We like to think we have come vast intellectual and emotional distances from our ancestors, and yet, when the face of death confronts us, we feel--if not see--how little we have changed from those ancestors and how tiny a piece of the universe within which we actually exist. It is at that moment when poetry and story become the umbilical making survival worthy of the effort to survive.

And so it is with Nemo, a boy turned soldier searching the planet in hopes of understanding his childhood losses and discovers only more loss until he unexpectedly senses another, even more ancient stranger who has fled his own world of war and loss. They both begin to understand that if they are to heal, the old aphorism "Home is where the heart is" must become a two-way street which embraces "Heart is where the home is."

The ancient, elder veteran realizes that only by serving as a guardian of his younger veteran's emotions, they both might keep their hearts and eventually find their way home--that place where like Tolstoy's Pierre Bezukhov and Homer's Odysseus--they might finally bury their oars.