nothin “It Must Be Heaven’s Zip Code” | New Haven Independent

It Must Be
Heaven’s Zip Code”

Allan Appel Photo

Poets George LaMarsh and Lisa Siedlarz.

A veteran from the Afghan War described the sunflowers east of Kabul. A Vietnam vet told of the mortuary detail. The surprise guest was a Civil War soldier from Vermont, evoked by his great grandson, himself a vet of World War II.

Thirty people heard their stories as they gathered at Christopher Martins Saturday afternoon on Orange Street at what has become an annual poetry reading by and about veterans.

Organizer Lisa Siedlarz, a veterans advocate and writing teacher, read from her new collection What We Sign Up For. Her initial writing on war was inspired by her brother’s service in Afghanistan.

Click here for a story about last year’s Veterans’ Day poetry slam at Bru.

One of Siedlarz’s brother’s comrades at arms, Ben Simon, was among the readers. Simon served for two tours, a total of 36 months, as a mortar man with the Army infantry. He is now in a master’s program a Trinity College — thanks to the post‑9/11 G.I. Bill, he said.

We’d shoot Nerf-size football projectiles at people,” was the way Simon matter-of-factly described his job in the military.

Siedlarz and Afghan War vet Ben Simon.

Yet Simon described his work as abstract, a collage of imagery, much of it from non-martial sources. Among the plumes of imagery floating through Simon’s prose poems were Judy Garland’s make-up and Mickey Rooney’s tap-dancing.

Among the enduring images he has brought back from his deployment are sunflowers. He said sunflowers were everywhere in Jalalabad. They grew immensely tall, huge, and beautiful. In a land where you saw only men, or women in burkas, he said, sunflowers in their openness and beauty were a kind of symbol for women.

Simon added that he enjoys using multiple sources because he likes to confound expectations of readers and listeners when people sit down to listen to a war poet.”

So his first poem began: I feel a song coming on and Mickey Rooney and Jerry Van Dyke and large pizza-sized pieces of open oven bread in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.”

World War II vet George LaMarsh read Arlington 5830,” about his great grandfather John Jay LaMarsh, a Union soldier from Vermont who lost his life in the Battle of the Wilderness in the Civil War.

A student of Siedlarz at her workshop at the West Haven vets center, LaMarsh appeared cool even though Saturday’s event was his first public reading.

Here’s the opening stanza:

There it stood
Its stone amid Arlington’s finest
Number 5830
It must be Heaven’s zipcode.

LaMarsh, who served with the army in Australia, concluded his poem with a touch of irony and whimsy.

He left his pension to his mother
Whatever happened to his wife?

Because of his ancestor never married, how did he, the poet, get here?

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