Across the DMZ, steel and gold were faced
Eye-to-eye and toe-to-toe
The tank traps, barbed wire, and concrete trenches
Safely arrayed behind rows of endless fences
Rippling in the frigid German winds of autumn
Functioning, it seemed at the time, and according to the
propagandists,
As structures, more to prevent their oppressed masses from
escaping,
Than to keep our Corps from invading
The weathered wooden cross memorials laid
For their desperate brothers, who never made
The final twenty meters to freedom's open arms
The stark, but well-appointed cinder towers,
Every kilometer it seemed, like sutures
Not for life-saving surgical procedures
But for the liberty excised
The young, ushanka-headed soldiers peered at us
Through their black plastic Soviet binoculars
So close, you could hear the state media broadcasts on the
wind
And smell the factories, just out-of-view
The sweaty, sweet and acrid
The industrial revolution's stench one hundred years hence.
And the light grey foggy haze that drifted across the
Z
Hinted at the assembly lines raging full throttle
Pens, dolls, binoculars, war medals, or vodka bottles
Never knew just what it was they were churning
Besides pollution
And conjecture
Until the frosty day the giant cranes arrived
Answering inevitably, Reagan's call
For Gorbachev to tear down this wall
Smokestacks growling fumes like angry bulls
And one by one the towers toppled, without the ceremonial
spade
Without the military band or sharp salute or the pageant or
parade
Steel blades sliced through rusted wires
To reveal, behind the steel, the glint of tarnished gold,
A hidden treasure that we quietly knew, would once again
emerge
Those trucks that once hauled soldiers, now hauling away
The legacy of cold and bitter days
For steel and gold, once opposed, now flowed united
In a hurricane of freedom
Strange, we now glance across history's tectonic chasm
And reminisce, almost affectionately, those nuclear drills,
The shrill wails of impending doom
Beneath our desks and in our bomb shelters, the canned peas,
The bottled water and gas masks, the flares and C-Rats
For all that, we knew the enemy, and they knew us
We knew ourselves, that bipolar world
Now, our cities fall to smoke and ash
We don't know the enemy now
And they burned Grozny to the dirt
They don't know the enemy now
The world spins chaotic and uncontrolled, angry and aflame
The enemy is everywhere, we are warned, and
The enemy is nowhere
Steel and gold, this untenable alloy, ally; allegory
Was it truly meant to be?
I yearn the DMZ.
[a variation of this poem appears in Vapours of Promise
(2004)]
by Kelly Allen Vinal
... who is an Army Chief Warrant Officer on active duty; and
whose poetry has been published in periodicals and books,
including Vision: Behind My Eyes (1983), Nefarious
Pandemonium (1986), Still Life (1989), Discipline
of Steel (1992), Party of One (2000), and Vapours
of Promise (2004). CW3 Vinal is also the author of The
Extracted MBA (2000) and Turbomanager (2004); and is a
former adjunct professor of management sciences at Campbell
University.