The Year My Brother Went to War
by Walt McDonald

I remember Big Tex at the State Fair,
a cowboy statue forty feet tall,
barns with a thousand palomino stallions,

a corral of Santa Gertrudis bulls
from a famous ranch in South Texas--
each bull nine massive feet high.

I remember my only roller-coaster ride
with my brother, Carl and a girl
he left at the gate, to make me a man

on the midway. For years he wrote
our mother and Melba down the block,
tossed by a typhoon in the Pacific,

bombed by Japanese and torpedoed,
missing in action until one day
in 1950 a telegram declared him

finally dead, and Mother turned
the envelope over and over
as if surely there'd been a mistake.

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