Homecoming (poem)

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Homecoming is a poem written by Bruce Dawe in 1968. The poem is in the collection Sometimes Gladness: Collected Poems, 1954 - 1992.

Homecoming is an anti-war poem written about the Vietnam War, but it could be written about any war. The poem describes the process of collecting and processing the dead from a war and shipping them home. It tells the story of soldiers coming home from war dead. The title is rather ironic. Dawe uses powerful techniques such as imagery, irony, paradox, repetition, accumilation and metaphors to portray deep emotions with an underlying layer of bitterness and spite which lashes out at all who promote war. At the beginning of the poem, the dead bodies are treated like garbage, being put into plastic bags, thrown recklessly into trucks and convoys and having no identity whatsoever until they arrive in Saigon where they are given names and stored in freezers like piles of meat.^{[opinion needs balancing]}

Homecoming – Bruce Dawe

All day, day after day, they're bringing them home,

they're picking them up, those they can find and bringing them

home,

they're bringing them in, piled on the hulls of Grants, in trucks

in convoys,

they're zipping them up in green plastic bags,

they're tagging them now in Saigon, in the mortuary coolness

they're giving them names, they're rolling them out of

the deep-freeze lockers - on the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut

the noble jets are whining like hounds,

they are bringing them home

- curly-heads, kinky-hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms

- they're high, now, high and higher, over the land, the

steaming chow mein,

their shadows are tracing the blue curve of the Pacific

with sorrowful quick fingers, heading south, heading east,

home, home, home - and the coasts swing upward, the old

ridiculous curvatures

of earth, the knuckled hills, the mangrove-swamps, the desert

emptiness...

In their sterile housing they tilt towards those like skiers

- taxiing in, on the long runways, the howl of their

homecoming rises

surrounding them like their last moments (the mash, the

splendour)

then fading at length as they move

on to small towns where dogs in the frozen sunset

raise muzzles in mute salute,

and on to cities in whose wide web of suburbs

telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree

and the spider grief swings in his bitter geometry

- they're bringing them home, now, too late, too early.