Megalithic monuments to our past.
Cold stone can’t heal broken hearts,
replace shattered dreams, give life
to memories of the dead.
When will truth
replace our human greed, when
will we ever learn? We see and hear
what we want
with blind eyes and deaf ears.
Why even ask?
Look both ways for life.
Mind gaps in memories, lest we lose what we have.
Awakened hours before sunrise,
he must guard, lest they come and kill;
this boy filled with fear and shock,
barely 19, taught to hate and kill,
now loyal to his clan, this new family,
his only friends, his only protection
as war has become his real world.
Miserable, hardened in every way,
unsympathetic, unimaginably deadly,
drawn to flashing light, learning
what he never wanted to know, addicted
to the battle, to the intoxicating fight.
He celebrates life with death, seeks random
revenge where none is possible,
has forgotten questions, never asks why,
lives in his personal accepted hated hell.
Sunrise lifts despair from his soul.
He smiles, alone, at the light of life,
happy to survive one more night.
He looks for answers, for that part of him,
now dead because he kills without a care.
Can he ever again be who he was born to be?
Look both ways to find another view.
Mind the gaps where questions decay away.
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 