The
War Correspondent
by
Joseph S. Pete
Ernie
Pyle filed dispatches about the sweaty grunt, the common man,
fed
an anxious, news-starved homefront weak and jittery from paltry
rations,
got
his typewriter-clattered copy devoured by the president’s wife,
bit
into the gleaming gold of a Pulitzer Prize.
As
the roving Scripps-Howard battlefront correspondent
lugged
his hefty Corona 3 into yet another fight,
a
sniper's bullet splattered the back of his skull out on the hot beach
sand.
-30-
The
unyielding deadline of time
claimed
the Ernie Pyle Museum in his hometown,
the
journalism school building that long bore his name
and
the faded remnants of his storied reputation.
They
erected a bronze statue of him
hunched
over his typewriter on campus,
but
misspelled his job title, “war corespondent,”
a
journalistic sin he may have himself
sometime
committed in haste
while
trying to make a shrapnel-riddled hell
feel
real oceans away.
From
the poet: Joseph
S. Pete is
an award-winning journalist, an Iraq War veteran, an Indiana
University graduate, a book reviewer, and a frequent guest on
Lakeshore Public Radio. He is a 2017 Pushcart Prize and Best of the
Net nominee who was named the poet laureate of Chicago BaconFest, a
feat that Geoffrey Chaucer chump never accomplished. His literary
work and photography have appeared or are forthcoming in Flying
Island, Dogzplot, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary
Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, New Pop Lit, The
Grief Diaries, Gravel, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch
Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, Chicago Literati, Bull Men's
Fiction, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar
Review, Lumpen, The Rat's Ass Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal,
Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, Vending Machine Press and elsewhere. He
once wrote the greatest, most compelling author bio of all time, but
it was snatched up by a blue heron that swooped down and carried it
off to the sea. C'est la vie.