As the daughter of two military officers, 17-year-old Michaela Coplen is no stranger to the stresses and rewards of being a military kid. Harnessing these experiences for her creativity, the Carlisle, Pa., native was named one of five outstanding high school poets to serve as national poetry ambassadors for the National Student Poets Program (NSPP). Coplen’s work exhibited exceptional creativity, dedication to craft, and promise, earning her the country’s highest honor for youth poets presenting original work.
In her role as national poetry ambassador, Coplen read two original poems at the America Joins Forces for Military Families III retreat on Friday, Feb. 7 attended by MFRI Director Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth. The following poem, titled “The Things We Carry,” was inspired by Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried,” and used with Ms. Coplen’s permission.
The Things We Carry
By Michaela Coplen
We carry their letters in our backpacks. We encase them in plastic, try to catch grains of sand that slip from the seams under stamps. In the late afternoon, after slogging through school, we dig through our homework for these buried deserts, spend an hour or two sifting through layers of cursive undertones. They never speak of war, except in missyous and behomesoons–instead they offer poetry and platitudes, advice that arrives a week too late. We press the gritty envelope flaps to our tongues, wonder if this is what they taste before they brush their teeth at night. We carry the “Love” they use to sign their letters, hold it like a Bible to our chests and dare God to intervene.
We carry what we have been taught to carry. Batteries. Sewing kits. Pens, pencils, erasers. A palm-sized journal. Wristwatches. Maps. Shoelaces and duct tape. We carry paranoia. The back-to-the-wall, where-are-the-exits, how-many-people-are-in-this-room, stay-out-of-crowds twitching that clutters cheap diner tables. We carry pocket knives and twine. We carry Run, Hide, Fight like a tattoo on our wrists. We carry an eye for anomaly, an ear for alarm, and a survivalist instinct that burrows itself into our guts.
We carry walkie-talkies and the NATO phonetic alphabet through the dark night of a gated base. Code names. Flashlights. We force our feet to be silent as we slip past MP stations and through curfew’s closing fist. We carry each other, holding on to friendships with the ferocity of knowing that we carry even more goodbyes. We camouflage ourselves in black and set up command centers in empty playgrounds. We borrow strategies from the History Channel and our parents’ dinner party conversations. We steal hidden flags, swear they’ll never touch the ground. We laugh and run and carry them pretending that these elaborate games of manhunt are not our way of practicing for Whiskey-Alpha-Romeo.
We carry our bag and shoes to the gym, where people say “have a good workout” like it’s “have a good Christmas.” A water bottle. A sweat towel. A playlist labeled “workout warrior.” We unpack the gifts of our bodies on machines and tracks and benches, carrying the weight of the knowledge that self-sufficiency is strength. We carry our biceps and six-packs like a sign on the lawn reading “Security System Installed Here.” Gatorade. Deodorant. Hair ties, sports bras, transience and the nomadic need to move. We compete with ourselves and carry a list of our shortcomings like a splinter in our sole.
Textbooks. Calculators. Honor Rolls and transcripts. We carry libraries from house to house, making the smallest cardboard boxes the heaviest ones. Notebooks and binders and mugs of late night coffee. We carry hours of study in bags under our eyes. We work so that our parents will have one less thing to worry about. We work so we’ll have time to see them when they come home on leave. We carry the wanting to do more than make them proud–the harder, sharper wanting to make ourselves proud. We carry that pride. We carry intimate knowledge of the biology of transplantation and the physics of a bullet.
We carry the practice of statistics. The rate of increase from one thousand to two thousand to three thousand. Percentage times three tours times thirty years equals x before retirement. The probability that it will be somebody we know. The probability that it will be our somebody. The knowing that there are things worse than death. We carry coffins and couches with equal force but different gravity.
We carry questions. More than the paradox of a countdown clock that keeps adding time, or the problem of a map without title or key. We carry whowhatwhenwherewhy like a piercing on our tongue, use it to tap out messages against our teeth (the things we’re afraid to ask: How many movie-theater-discounts does it take to buy back a childhood?). We carry our silence in mouths chewed raw from lack of speaking.
We carry stones–smooth and flat, picked up along the road–to place on grandpa’s grave. It’s hard to find him, another uniform white slab among rows of thousands (pristine and regimented as ever). He is black-lettered and not yet fading, sandwiched between an immigrant and an eighteen-year-old. We walk home carrying the need to write a poem for every gravestone. We carry the aunts and sons, the coaches and dog-lovers, book worms and runners, the painters and preachers, politicians and pacifists, the tough guys, philosophers, sweethearts, the parents who lie here. We carry the veterans lying on city street corners, and those who never made it home. We carry the sisters and cousins that stand in their place. When the time comes, we too will carry the torch. We wear helmets made of stoic steel and lined with hope.
We carry safety pins like bad habits and dog tags like talismans. We carry dandelions in our hands and countries on our backs. We carry on.