Jamail Center for Legal Research
Tarlton Law Library

Graduation Circumstance

Like a bevy of blackbirds tossed against the moving sky,
spurred by the falling barometer before the squall,
the planed hats hang at the peak of their arc,
pause in indecision, then swoop, awry,

into downward spirals. Dark squares soar upward again
in slowed motion, inked kites seesawing
on the pitch of wind, pulling children taut,
confirming the possibility of flight. The horizon

clears, mortarboards land in outstretched
hands, skim the floor. Humid stillness cracks
with the rumble of laughter and cawing, thunder
of tears and applause. Clouds, gowned marchers,

sweep across the hall, recess, all pomp and innocence,
race the lightning, hurtle toward the eye of turbulence.

Upon the Exhumation of the Vietnam Unknown

   Arlington National Cemetery, May 14, 1998

"Disturbed with profound reluctance, but in keeping
with the military's commitment to identify its fallen soldiers"
               -- William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense

Is he Air Force Lt. Michael J. Blassie,
Hawk-02, 8th Special Operations Squadron,
flying an olive drab A-37 quick and low to dump
a load of napalm; suddenly he's rolling, plunging
into trees, a cloud of smoke the last thing he sees

or Army Capt. Rod Strobridge, Blue Max 10,
diving in a Cobra Helicopter on two tanks, the siege
of An Loc, Vietnamese for "peaceful prosperity,"
taking fire from antiaircraft missiles; a streak from
below cuts him in two, aircraft down May 11, 1972?

The Tomb has been his home for a second lifetime
cut short; he rests beneath a prone marker addressed
to the Unknown of Vietnam 1959-1975; above him
the marble sarcophagus stands at attention, inscribed:
"Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to 
     God."

The honor guard sentry marches back and forth
in pressed blues every hour of the day, every two at night;
after 21 steps, shined shoes heel-click precisely at the turn;
their cheaters crack sharply, jar the steel casket
of bones:  four ribs, a pelvis, one humerus.

Now machines come to rescue him twenty years too late:
the whine, not of medvac choppers, but diamond
tipped blades splitting granite and marble, stirring
dust in the uprooted treasure chest as a crane lifts
his remains through the fogged shroud of dawn.

A bugler raises white gloved hands, lillies flutter in a garden
of stone, Grace's cadence thrums into bones; uniformed
pallbearers camouflage him in stars and stripes for excavation

of his archival heart; ruptured ground begs mercy from the
     thrusting
sun: he earned his rest in earth's rooted crib now shuddering in
     release.

Ellen Sazzman was born in 1951 at Cleveland, Ohio, where she grew up. She attended the University of Chicago where she obtained her B.A. degree, and Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, where she received her J.D. She was admitted to practice in 1977. Sazzman is a regulatory attorney with the federal government.
Sazzman's poetry has been published in Rockhurst Review, Potato Eyes, Soul Fountain, and California Quarterly. She received honorable mentions in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg poetry contest sponsored by the Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley, California; and received a free verse award in the 1999 International Poetry Contest of the National League of American Pen Women (Palomar, California Branch).