Coming Home From The Front To Find Truth In A Tree

Them    

Oh, for war’s sweet end.

To be grounded in home,

to fall on my knees

with you under our tree.

Freed from the smells

of gore—I mean glory,

we’ll kiss and we’ll kiss

but they’ll do it again,

not me, not us but them.

They’ll do it again

For there’s always a them—

a new wave of them

who yearn for the glory

of the rush and the burn

the fame of a kiss frozen in frieze.

Again.

            She

She thought she saw him in a tree

forked and struck by lightning.

His hair was streaked with veins of red

with chips of bark caught in the gray.

His chin was a crag with a cleft she could bite.

She holds him in her mouth, hungry.

            He

He came to the tree to find her.

The leaves shuffled their cards

and shaded the ground

where they fell to their knees, eager and raw.

The whisper of her voice was in and around

but his war-ravaged brain had lost her to him.

The whys and the whens all lost to him—

If only I could remember the smell of her skin—

but the only scent was the rot in the wood,

the bowels of human longevity,

of those who came before and made war and forged steel

and cut down the trees (though not this one),

top shorn off by lightning, splintered and decrepit

but foretelling truth,

like the promise of sap to flow in the spring.