By Douglas Rawlings 

NUMBER 7

I was a
Good Humor Man.
I lost my job
I got drafted.

I can never
go back again.
I lost my
Good Humor.
I lost $80.00 a week
I can never
have it again

You gain goodwill
being a Good Humor man.
You establish a route.
You make friends.

I lost them all:
my bike my cart
my bell
are all gone now.
My smile too.
All my friends
cried
on the Last Day.

On the Last day
I gave all my
ice cream away free
to all my friends.
They still cried.
I did too.

I came home with
an empty cart
and my Boss said:
“Good all sold.”
I said:
“No all free.”
And cried.

He didn’t cry.
He said:
“You owe me $16.00.”

I think his brother
works at my Draft Board.

 

Douglas Rawlings was born in Rochester, NY. Drafted out of graduate school at Ohio State in the fall of 1968, sent to Viet Nam in January 1969 as a member of the 7/15th artillery, ending up at a fire base in the central highlands for 13 1/2 months. Returned and finally got a Master of Arts in Teaching English from Boston College, ending up teaching high school in Boston and Maine for six years and then finally teaching/administering programs at the University of Maine at Farmington for 27 years. I retired five years ago. Living in a refurbished 1822 farmhouse in central Maine, I teach a course in Peace Studies at the university each semester. I am a founding member of Veterans For Peace and am presently the president of our Maine Chapter. I have two collections of poetry out — ORION RISING and A G.I. IN AMERICA — and am the editor of a collection of LETTERS TO THE WALL (for the past four years we have delivered four hundred letters to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC each Memorial Day. There are 150 letters in our first edition with another edition coming out).