​​Leaving 

The ship’s royal blue logo flies over the ocean,
 
eleven decks high, suspending a huge chandelier
 
of one hundred exploding suns.
 
And a woman sings, “Leaving on a jet plane,”
 
and the dining room fades away,
 
and it’s 1969, and my heart sees again all those young, long-haired musicians
 
in cheap, too short, brown suits, guitar straps around their necks,
 
bending into taxis,
 
and a gray-blue image of a waiting plane
 
softened by slanting rain
 
transporting them to a wet, tangled Asian jungle.
 
Then the dining room comes back into focus --
 
pale leather chairs around big white-clothed table --
 
and Philline, my young Filipino waitress,
 
dazzles a wide smile for me.
 
Dressed in her crisp white shirt and black waistcoat,
 
she says she flies home to Manila in two months
 
to her family waiting in a white cement house.
 
I left no one behind, no one really cared to let me go.
 
A soft tinkle of water poured in my glass,
 
and the sound of Philline placing a shrimp cocktail in front of me
 
startles, and I look towards the blue expanse of ocean
 
that vanishes once more
 
replaced by those long-haired, young soldiers,
 
musicians, future doctors, builders, or mechanics,
 
lost and left behind in Nam’s downpour,
 
and my youth washed away with them,
 
and my fresh face, once like Philline’s,
 
now shattered in the rain,
 
from all the dawns that have broken,
 
and as cutlery clatters around me,
 
the loves I’ve lost –
 
that I closed my eyes
 
and they, and I, were forced to go,
 
went beyond all joy, encompassing all grief,
 
past this voyage outside the door,
 
and none of us could ever come back again. 

by Contributing Poet  Susan H. Evans   Copyright © 2024 
VWP 2024     First published in  VietnamWarPoetry.com 

Bio:  Susan H. Evans  lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and enjoys writing non-fiction, memoir, and poetry. Her most recently published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Cease and Caesura,  Dogwood Alchemy, The Hooghly Review, and a travel story will be published in mid-August in In the Know Traveler. ​