WET BEHIND THE EARS Poems by Brian K. Smith

In 2004, The New England Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVIII and the CIA admitted that there was no imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Facebook was founded at Cambridge, Massachusetts and Scientists in South Korea announced the cloning of 30 human embryos. The last coal mine in France closed, ending nearly 300 years of coal mining and the last Oldsmobile rolls off of the assembly line. In North Korea mobile phones were banned and Terry Nichols was convicted by an Oklahoma state court on murder charges stemming from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In that year, the National World War II Memorial was dedicated in Washington, DC and thousands of people in Hong Kong took to the streets to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Preliminary hearings began in Iraq in the trial of former president Saddam Hussein, for war crimes and crimes against humanity and Lance Armstrong of Austin, Texas won an unprecedented 6th consecutive Tour de France cycling title. The 2004 Summer Olympics were held in Athens and the TV series Lost aired its pilot. On December 26, 2004, one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history hit Southeast Asia, when the strongest earthquake in 40 years hit the entire Indian Ocean region. The massive 9.3 magnitude earthquake, epicentered just off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, generated enormous tsunami waves that crashed into the coastal areas of a number of nations including Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. The official death toll in the affected countries stands at 186,983 while more than 40,000 people are still missing. It had been nine years since my last book, and I was married with two kids. Life was busy and I had only written on rare occasions until one day I was inspired to sit down and the words began to flow for weeks. I put together my third book of poems. Some were old ones that I had stuffed in a box and some were new. I had not picked up my pencil in a few years and I was rusty. You might say I was still a little Wet Behind The Ears.