A War Bird's Burlesque
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-12-14

Day 271 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

First published in Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag.

Sandburg writes: "In that revealing and vivid diary “War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator (Williams-Ford Texas A&M University Military History Series) by John MacGavock Grider,” we learn of a flyer in World War I whose father was a cotton mill owner and, as the diarist tells us, “There was a bomb raid on last night and the dugout was stuffy so he and I went out and crawled under a box car on the siding. It’s about as good shelter as you can get. We got to talking about home."

"I asked him what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to write but his father is determined to make a horny-handed hardboiled superin­tendent out of him. He’s all the time scribbling now. He’s always stopping something important to jot down a plot, as he calls it, for future reference. He’s got a brief case full of them already,— plays, short stories, poems, sketches or what have you. He’s tried to read me some of them several times. ” He lost one eye, was wounded, battered, made all sacrifices asked. In an interlude of the program of hell and death, he had an affair “with a very charming young lady who more or less owed allegiance to a big diplomat. We were all kidding him about it one night and after listening awhile he retired and penned a poem [A War Bird's Burlesque] on the subject. . .

Nine of the verses are presented here with the melody given them by Chicago overseas service men, Paul Boston and John Locke.