Everything is Connected by Martin Willitts Jr

Everything is Connected

It’s pointless to regret what might have been.
Just ask my father about the Second World War,
when his cannon backfired,
killing everyone else immediately, and leaving him deaf.
He knew what it was like to be covered in blood splatter.

I can picture my father, limp on red ground,
when some field medic, checking for pulses,
brings him back to safety. War explodes time.

I know the loneliness of choices,
as a field medic in Vietnam,
how survivors feel guilty making it alive,
other men never going home.

I can almost see my father
waking up on a cot in a hospital, unable to hear
some doctor asking, “Can you follow my finger?”
The doctor’s lips moving silently,
my father not responding.

I also know this story:

my father had a war buddy
who promised to fix him up with a woman he knew.
She worked in a factory where they made weapons
that helped increase killing.
When she witnessed all those wounded men
next to my father, she quit her job.
She became my mother.

When I received my draft notice for Vietnam,
my mother hid the mail. She knew war subtracts,
leaves some wounds you never see.

I volunteered to be a medic. I couldn’t imagine killing.

War numbs many of us. I know what it’s like
to walk through fields of dying and wounded men,
needing to leave the dying behind.
I touched death. It felt human.

My mother never forgave me for being that close to death.

My father never told me what it was like to be a survivor;
I had to learn the hard way.

My mother tip-toed around problems, biting her tongue,
frustrated with his deafness.

I could never tell my son about war,
although he loved playing with toy soldiers.
He might have thought it odd when I suggested
needing a toy medic, although he never said anything.

We never know where life goes,
and choices narrow into vanishing points.
Not being able to talk out issues
leaves scabs on a heart.

And, I have to admit,
I could not tell him the toll war had taken on me.
I could not talk about Vietnam for years.
I kept those secrets inside me,
a locket of misery.

I still have problems talking about it.

War creates another type of deafness.
I am trying to remove those bandages of silence.

It’s time to carry out the wounded.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages.

He has over 20 full-length poetry collections including “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Still Point Press, 2024); “Not All Beautiful Things Need to Fly” (Silver Bow Publishing, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Collected Works” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and forthcoming, “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (March Street Press, 2025).