THE WARTIME ISSUE W. Luther Jett   RECESSIONAL A man is writing a poem on a very dark night in a time of war as planes fly over his head. He intends it to be a sonnet but the meter isn't right, so he settles for free verse and keeps writing. And as he writes, he becomes conscious of another man who is also writing a poem in the middle of a war-torn night. And with an awareness verging on vertigo, he realizes that the poem the other man is writing is about him. Indeed, it is about him writing poetry on a dark night, and how he--the first man-- is a poem inside another poem. And the man writing about him is also a poem, being written by a third man on a dark night in wartime. And it becomes clear-- as clear as things can become in times of war--that the third man is also a poem. The third man is a poem being written by a fourth man, and there are poems within poems, an infinite recessional. All these poems, being written by men who are, themselves, poems within poems being written by other men. And this is when the first man understands that if he is a poem within a poem within a poem, then it is all one poem. One poem with infinite verses being written with infinite hands on infinite nights in a time of infinite war. And with a clarity that is only possible when one realizes that one is a poem inside a poem the man begins to write: “A man is writing a poem on a very dark night in a time of war as planes fly over his head ....”     W. Luther Jett lives in Washington Grove, MD, and has published a chapbook of poems and original graphics, A Leather Dress Fur Mother. He began writing shortly after learning how to hold a crayon and started transcribing his ideas onto paper shortly thereafter. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including The GW Review, WordWrights, Syncopated City, Synæsthesia, ABRAXAS, The Burning Cloud Review, Middle Class Review, and Main Street Rag, as well as in several journals published on the World Wide Web.   Published in Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2006.