Standing Against Wyoming Wind

In Cheyenne there were no thoughts, only wind,
a wind I stood against on a brutal February
in 1969. Hands grasping a bible, fingers cold
as death, I walked to my draft board dressed
in a JC Penney suit so poorly tailored it
could have come from Khrushchev’s closet.

Ashamed of my conscientious objection,
Mother wouldn’t let me use her car.
Killing didn’t bother her. She wanted
a snool, but she got me.

Wind blistered the prairie.
Hate blistered my country.

The head of my draft board instructed me
to wait in a utility closet. I sat atop a canister
of institutional disinfectant.

What is it like to end a world—end it with a bullet?
Who has that right?

Old men were sending us off to kill, to die.
One of them fell asleep during my hearing.
They hadn’t read my ten-page argument
for not killing people—my plea for Spinoza’s
pantheism, the physics of sanctity, of sanity.
Every life is holy, I told them.

Coward, a friend’s father called me
(not to my face, of course).

The freezing wind swept me homeward—
my journey bleak as mouth-mist
in frigid gray air. They’d never grant
my objection. Had there ever been
a conscientious objector in Wyoming?

My future—a pallid hue of prison, exile, or both.
The wind in Cheyenne roared, but I heard only
the silence of hopelessness.


Two months after my disinfected declaration
at the draft board, their letter arrived. My hands
shook on that wind-withered day. Maybe if I
didn’t open the letter, physics would back up,
time would stop.

They had granted my objection!

I felt a gentle spring breeze sweep over me.
The brown-grassed prairie turned
a bright shade of hope.