‘Homecoming’ by Bruce Dawe is a confronting poem which describes through literary prose the senseless violence of war and the toll it takes on the young soldiers who fought during the conflict.
Throughout the poem, Dawe describes the experiences of soldiers both on and off the battlefield, in both cases being treated with contempt and viewed as insignificant. Written to describe the encounters of those coming home during the Vietnam conflict, “Homecoming” has a specific historical context as the Australian public during this period had a strong anti-Vietnam war culture by the latter periods which resulted in soldiers being treated poorly and with little respect. This can be contrasted with soldiers homecoming experiences prior from the World Wars and later conflicts in the Middle East where soldiers have been treated as those making a significant sacrifice for their country and the freedom of others.
Homecoming Poem
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 hill, the mangrove-swamps, the desert emptiness…
in their sterile housing they tilt towards these 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 bring them home, now, too late, too early.