(First published in Lip Service Magazine, Spring/Fall 1987)
Heals click like gunshots
As the uniformed robot with shaved head
Turns. White gloves swat
The rifle from shoulder to shoulder, which form
The top line of the blue trapezoid
Based on a twenty-nine inch waist.
He duckwalks thirty paces
North and thirty paces south.
Day and night he guards the grave
Of four whom nothing can hurt anymore.
As he salutes, his clockwork arms at five
Minutes to midnight, he overlooks beyond
The tomb the obelisk and dome and all
The pillared Roman monuments to power.
Less than forty years from now,
They tell us, Arlington Cemetery will be full.
Where shall we then bury our unknowns?
They’re running a final solution contest.
The winning missiles, swarming like asteroids,
Will broadcast the ashes of nameless millions,
Mingled with marble dust, throughout
The capitol city sarcophagus
Leaving four heat-etched silhouettes
On billboards of government walls
To be greeted decades later by some
Lumbering radiation-suited sergeant
Raising a bulky mitted hand.