Dedicated to all the war poets, and those who died during warfare.
"When the prison guards burned his manuscripts,
Nguyen Chi Thien couldn't stop laughing -
The 283 poems already inside him." – Ocean Vuong.
To have words engraved into us,
like wood carved
to make a pattern-
pictures of black skies and such hopeless need,
a desire etched adoringly into collar bones
stained with kisses like stamps of self-deceit.
Adorned doubt and
darling there must
be some crack in the moonlight;
the monocle of a mosaic
smiling from the cheeks of this egg shell
prison.
Sunlight electrified through us.
We may never
see this again yet still, the word
resistance
is burnt into us -raising the stakes-
like all those years ago:
blazing for redemption.
How the words of all those
war poets sacrificed
themselves,
how they lit the dim shadows of grief;
how the bodies of those who wrote them,
fractured pieces of femur and bone
relics of broken ring fingers
lost loves,
body parts never coming home;
how they laughed hysterically at the sight of it.
Each verse: pierced through them by a sudden light.
One they could not wash away.
To have those words engraved must be to have
a second chance of recollection,
after everything else
seemingly mortal
is gone.
As the words burst
battered
brutally broken stand like
sentinel soldiers. Forever fighting a war we
only remember for the pyrrhic victories.
Never lungs lost. Whatever the cost-
Never to be devoured by things that hit far too
close to home.
Home-
they had a home they wished they could run too
through that green gas; poisonous cloud
forcing the sizzling sinister
sensation of acidic pain slicing through
skin-
A Daughter, sits beside her Mother wondering when
Daddy will be home,
the clock strikes midnight:
Nail your colours to the mast boys
They never let them fade.
YOU ARE READING
Vultures And Other Vulnerabilities.
Poetry"I hope it gives you the same satisfaction as finishing a really good book, Or kissing someone, and not walk away feeling like they have taken something from you."
