Devin Alaric Mikles, MD, FACP is a retired internal and integrative medicine physician. He has been a student of multiple systems of healing since 1969. His primary vision and goal through the last 30 years has been to assist in the development of new paradigms of healing for our planet. He was raised in a military family and his father served during 4 wars. As a dependent of a career army sergeant, Devin lived in post WWII Japan , and in Germany during the construction of the Berlin Wall and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He really became acutely aware of the facts of wars as a dependent of a military serviceman during the Vietnam war. Much of his poetry related to that is from his direct experience of his father’s participation during that time, and the results of war trauma on his father and many other American friends in the post Vietnam era. He has been writing poetry, singing and playing music since he was in grade school and has published his poems in print journals and online including on the now archived website: poets against war. He has been an active member of the Nobel Peace Prize winning organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility since the 1980’s.
Powerful poetry Dev. “Telegram” is truth. The reality of combat spills out. Soldiers, like me, bring our wars home. My mother told me the war came home to her December 15 1968, the day I left for South Vietnam. When we go to war, the Telegrams start coming.
Thank you, Dev
Tom
I admire how the title of this poem becomes the first powerful line.
How we know right away that the bite of terrible news is upon us.
What this poem offers is the inescapable collision of public
and private worlds. The unending sources of anger and desire
have culminated in yet another death announced in a mother’s doorway.
This poem in ALL CAPS is a vivid and submerging reminder of how
war can define us with its demands that never stop.
From the perspective of God, the poet designates just a fraction of the suffering, eventual capitulation in 1975 of Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, in the form of a telegram to Mrs. Sargent. This effort is the first of a trilogy titled Southeast Asia Trilogy by the poet producing the repugnance of war (once again) as a choice…a choice absurdly defended by the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. And even God probably could not stomach or admit God’s helpless indifference to the genocide which consumed the next three or four years in Cambodia with every beautiful countryside aghast with skulls piled eye-level deep.
zrobbinfitzgerald