War Poetry

An American Soldier

There is no final solution for wretched man,
only a quest for good fellows to defy them.
I am a revolutionary of true colors
carrying the weight of the world
in my immigrant red, white, and blue hands.
Always puckering for a kiss of democracy
I lay back and fall easily in love
with my terrain.
I know no war is an easy war
but I am aware that within its frenzy of gloom
it reanimates the speechless.
War,
a place where madness in the eye of a flower seems
normal
and at the end of the stain of the day the beauty of
being
is forever gone to a place where whimpering
willowy men and women are soon crushed by
dangerous things in the crosscurrents of the air, then
crucified.
How can we ignore misery
and deepen the darkness
by laying back like reclining nudes
with faraway eyes? No grace, no grit, no honor.

For me it is not so simple.
My eyes, like distant beacons,
shield the will-less on their borders
and as the gray gulf pulls us close to them
we stand as one, waist-deep in lumps of earth wielding
our orange tambourines
and pray the goal of glory
becomes as visible and as dominant
as the force of prairie lightning.

I am a soldier, your sweet protector
(where old terrors mingle) creeping on until their
undoing.
Sign of life,
as I carry the world piece by piece.

by Mary Hamrick