[Newspoetry] Grieving the Dead and the Dying

[DL Emerick]

Grieving the Dead and the Dying

>From Stories whispered to history.

 

One, a news item, of a soldier's suicide,

After showing up at a VA hospital,

And being denied access to treatment,

Of never-eased pains of his war efforts,

That he had hoped to soothe and ease,

Troubling scars on a mind in conflict.

 

A soldier in a local bar spoke to me,

Of his anguish, hale, strong and husky,

Of his tour of combat action in Iraq,

Of confronting a child of 6 or 8,

A pretty little girl child, wan and pale,

Who shivered as she advanced on him,

Holding a pistol in hand, trigger-happy,

And how he had then blindly fired,

Seeing her fingers tighten to squeeze.

Faces of men who then jumped from cover -

Those he never saw as he shot them down, too -

But the little's girl face still haunts him,

Especially now that he has returned home,

To his own girl child, same innocent age -

Can he forget what he never should see?

 

Another story was of a civilian,

Who reacted normally, perhaps,

to the violent rape of a young woman,

Justice, in its own way and time,

Somehow, even in our corrupt society,

Managed to make an appearance.

The villain disappeared, in the hills,

Terrain conceals all avenging deaths.

Even yet, that just death pursues him:

The look in the eyes of the man who died,

The look from those eyes, into his eyes,

As death is never kind nor benign -

Even when we hear a person in pain,

Saying, wistfully, wishfully, in agony,

Let me die, let me die, let me die -

In the night he yet screams his pain,

And in the day he drinks to escape it.

 

And, I heard chaplains celebrating love,

The death of Dorchester's Four Chaplains,

Who did what duty asked them to do:

Be not complicit in the death of others,

Complicit by standing by when they die.

 

I spoke at yesterday's memorial ceremony,

Spoke as a Jew for Rabbi Goode's memory,

Spoke of the unfathomable word "duty" --

More elusive than its cognate "love" --

Which Hollywood trivializes and trashes,

In the pornography of flesh end desire,

When truly and always, "love" is only "duty":

A blindness to the facts of one's own life,

In one's regard for the well-being of others.

 

It is said, I command you to love one another,

For, by that true love, you come before God,

Who accepts no false lip service as idols do.

 

Such stories as these arise, phantoms of me,

Against a grieving for the dead and the dying.

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