"Tommie the Commie"

Tom McGrath was a poet from North Dakota who died in 1990. I interviewed him a few years before that in Minneapolis, where he was living in public housing in the Seward neighborhood. He was once called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, whose flunkies gave him the nickname, though he didn't say that he disliked it that I can recall: an old, tired, pessimistic, moral voice. He talked to me about his glum feelings about the USA, which in retrospect was better then. Watching Cheney and all these rotten guys made me think what he wrote in Remembering This Island:

In a dream as real as war

I see the vast stinking Pacific suddenly awash
Once more with bodies, landings on all beaches,
The bodies of dead and living gone back to appointed places,

A ten year old resurrection,
And myself once more in the scourging wind, waiting, waiting
While the rich oratory and the lying famous corrupt
Senators mine our lives for another war.