Thanks to Mish and the folks at dVerse ~ Poets Pub, for Open Link Night #270 (click for link). This poem messes with where my head’s been lately.
***
Combatant
It could have been me.
A nod, a blink, an okay
and the next forty-five
years …
had I not been killed, maimed
or driven insane
(as many of us were)
… would not have been anything
like what I look back to today,
fifty-six long years hence,
with contrition, feeling the loss;
Personal, hidden, illogical
survivor syndrome. I can’t
make sense of it. The feeling
of a warrior who wasn’t.
Life choices often made
thoughtlessly, in a blink.
I could be dead. Change the past?
Not on your life or mine.
***
Look both ways at guilt for life: fortune or folly.
Mind the gaps in the mindless wars with reality.
Our Literary Journey 
Spiky right and so true – resonates with the integrity of a man who has lived and knows what life is about – thanks for sharing so openly Bill… Gives us all pause for thought, I’m sure…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for your comment.
LikeLike
Welcome to the pub, Bill! Yours is another of those poems that brings me closer to something I know nothing about and helps me to understand it a little bit more. The power of ‘a nod, a blink, an okay’ is amazing – it can change everything,
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, Kim. I don’t understand it. But that’s the point, for me.
LikeLike
Very sobering thoughts. What could have been me, was another. Thank you for sharing.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Survivor’s guilt is very real, and we think “there but for the grace of God” our life might have been extingiished in a blink. You recount the feelings well.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Wonderfully done, Bill. You have a wonderful pen (une belle plume, in French).
Those “games” we play in our minds, the ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ that we really have no control over in the first place. We truly can torment ourselves, can’t we?
LikeLiked by 1 person
We can and do.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks for the wonderful words.
LikeLiked by 1 person
My pleasure to read your words
LikeLiked by 1 person
Welcome to Dverse, am not a regular at the bar but it certainly is a place to connect with such a range of emotion. Survivor’s guilt lasts a lifetime and you convey it so well and I think there is a need to share these felings. A colleague once gave a talk to my literature students on visiting the war graves in France. His father who was vey old wanted his son to lay some flowers on a grave of his friend. He had never talked about it until this point in time. It moved us all as that generation certainly hid their feelings. But these memories keep pushing up especially I think later in life.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Welcome to dVerse! Maybe instead of living in guilt we can live more vibrantly in honour of those we’ve lost. I can only imagine the struggle and emotion though. Thanks for sharing this intimate reflection.Hope to see more of your work. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks
LikeLike
Why is a question that haunts many parts of our lives. (K)
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have no answer.
But, with more past than future, I look at both differently. Thanks for the comment. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
These times make us face our mortality like never before! Well done.
Dwight
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks, Dwight.
LikeLiked by 1 person