On the web Dare I Read is where you come for your Oz-themed poems. This one I found in an anthology:
Eagle in the Land of Oz
I was talking
to a friend
and I noticed
a tin
leg
hanging on his wall
he said he
got it
in cambodia
there had been
an air strike
on a
n. v. a. hospital
it had been on
one
of the bodies
I thought of the
Tin Man of Oz
who had no heart
lions and tigers and bears
Don Receveur
The last line makes clear that the poet is thinking about the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz movie. (That’s where the “lions and tigers and bears” line occurs.) In the movie the Tin Man was made by a tinsmith. “He forgot to give me a heart,” the Tin Man says.
In L. Frank Baum’s original story the Tin Woodman was first an ordinary flesh and blood person. A wicked witch curses the man’s ax so that it swings back on its user, chopping off an arm. The man goes to a tinsmith who replaces the missing limb with a tin one. Unlike a prosthetic in the real world, in Oz the tin replacements (eventually the man’s entire body, including his head) are as alive as the parts they replace. Presumably, the tinsmith thought a heart replacement no more important than a set of tin intestines or lungs.
In a sequel Baum eventually introduces a doppelgänger for the Tin Woodman, a Tin Soldier. Similar origin story.
In his dark Oz novel, The March of the Tin Soldiers, Steve Ahlquist has the wicked witch herself providing the prosthetics, though in this case the replacement parts are the ones that are cursed, forcing their new owners to obey the magical maker. Seems like a good way to build an army.
We don’t know if the person killed in the hospital in Don Receveur’s poem was a soldier, but it’s a good guess. Perhaps the soldier was heartless? Or maybe the war? — after all, bombing a hospital is a war crime. Receveur leaves it to the reader to find meaning in the connection between Oz and Vietnam.
source:
Carrying the Darkness: the poetry of the Vietnam war
edited by W. D. Ehrhart
1989. Texas University Press, Lubbock TX
