I remember/The day my youth ended / When my brother asked me / Have you thought about the draft?

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FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury, Corgi 1957. 160 pages. Cover by John Richards.
(Image by Jim Linwood)   Details   DMCA

It was 1968

I am driving my Morris Minor

With red leather bucket seats.

(I remember the weight of the hood.)

I remember Pegasus,

The flying horse on the Mobil sign.

I remember

The day my youth ended

When my brother asked me

Have you thought about the draft?

I remember the red in the markings of the carapace

Of my painted turtle.

I remember the red of the fall leaves

And the cover of Fahrenheit 451, 1972.

Between '68 and '72,

I thought a lot about the draft.

Then something in me caught fire.

I was a pacifist on fire,

Red hot.

My road was red.

Dawn was red,

The whole horizon.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.