#r.t.smith

[pinturas-sgm-aviacion]

1941 12 25 Christmas Over Rangoon - Roy Grinnell

Christmas Day 1941 dawned hot and muggy in Rangoon, Burma. It would be another 115-degree day. Charles H. Older was one of thirteen pilots of the American Volunteer Group's Third Pursuit Squadron standing alert near their shark-mouthed Tomahawks on Mingaladon Airdrome, north of Rangoon. In his first combat two days earlier he had been credited with two Japanese bombers. At 1130 the air raid sounded, and minutes later 13 Tomahawks, joined by 16 RAF Brewster Buffaloes, rose to meet the enemy. At 1210 the Japanese formation was sighted – three waves of bombers (90 in all) and approximately 60 escorting fighters. George McMillan, R.T.Smith, and Robert P. "Duke" Hedman attacked the left flank leading the "V" of bombers while Chuck Older, Tommy Haywood and Ed Overend worked over the right flank. The other seven took on the fighters. With Haywood on his right wing, Older attacked from below and to the right of the outboard "V". Opening fire at 200 yards, in an almost vertical climb, he held the trigger down until less than 100 yards, and then kicked over in a hammerhead to dive away.Using this zoom and dive technique he and Haywood shot down two bombers each. As the bombers turned east for home, Older downed a Nakajima Oscar for his third victory of the day. Twenty-four Japanese planes fell to the AVG that day. Chuck Older became an ace as did Duke Hedman, who shot down four bombers and a fighter. Other credited AVG victories included three for McMillan and Smith, two each for Parker DuPouy and Ed Overend, and one each for Bob Brouk and Ken Jernstedt.

[fluttering-slips]

Sweetgum and Cedar        

For ages, I wanted a poem with hard and scaly bark, a sweetgum, leaves with sawtoothed lobes, the grain tight, each sawed log sap-sealed and able to grip several wedges at once, its gist and intention beyond the human ken, a heart hardy as rebar and dangerous to any axe's edge. I wanted a poem so rooted in beauty every bird in it would sing the pure vernacular amid fruitballs exotic and spiky as ancient weapons, wood that burned slow from simmer to ember and might last the night before falling to ash.

But now I need a poem more like sweet cedar, a whim, volunteer from a seed shat by some migrant in flight with only weather to do the nourishing work, the mature thing ideal for windbreak and shelter belt, an eastern red cedar easy to split and sliver, its timber a harbor for the shapes and shades of flame, species once the sole donor of heartwood for pencils, though who now even owns a pencil and writes by the hearth where flames crackle and shimmer, the smoke fragrant as a forest, say sweetgum, say cedar, writing for life — with graphite sleeved in its miracle of wood — this dark sentence across the long night of words? R.T. Smith