1970
a poem by Peter Sorensen
Today we will be calm. We will take in a poem. We will thank the poet, or we will be so overcome by its words that we forget.
1970 by Peter Sorensen The man dreams more often now of the boy he had been. He dreams of the anger and the hunger the boy had embraced. though at times restrained The man supposes it is natural. The boy had dreamed too. His were dreams of cordite death and jungle lust. He would come awake erect and sweating – nostrils flared stinging of smoke and bodies. The brittle cool of his bedroom scattered the bruised lushness of his dream, but slowly. Softening at last to languid sleep. The boy had not gone, had stayed to shout his rage and his fear like a heretical priest drawn and quartered on the steps of some nameless federal office building in ohio. But it had not calmed the terrors he dreamed. They returned, the dreams. A plague fervid and ghastly. A craving carnal and grim. An ache he could touch only in the night. Now the man says he might have gone. But knows that he did not. He does not know if it was the death or the lust that kept the boy still. Now he knows that it does not matter. They are the same.
Meet the Author:
Peter Sorensen has been writing poems, short stories and plays for as long as he can remember. He wrote “1970” in the last years of his long tangle with being a high-stakes commercial litigation attorney—mostly in Arizona but often in exciting places like New York, the UK and Lincoln, Nebraska. That gave him a long and memorable view of the underside of corporate life and, in particular, corporate death. Now retired, he mostly struggles with the underside of a four-iron.
Peter lives in Phoenix with his wife. His two grown sons live nearby. All of them are engineers.