When a solider makes it home
A soldier makes it home
in a paralysis of memory
and unforgotten fear,
he has walked from a country station
and looks on an English landscape,
with eyes full of strange broken
opportunity, hungry for beauty,
his whole being disintegrated by mad trembling.
Red lips kissed by English dead,
mind screaming
that no one but him can hear.
The green fields slope off to a distant smoke
haze constable landscape, peace and
forgiveness a million miles away...
The mouths of politician’s squeak,
but you imagine a foreign field
where the air is loud with death.
Lightning and thunder inside your nervous system,
a constant replay of Dante.
There will be no victory march,
the coming indifference will not even allow tears,
I have no more tears,
I live in a vacuum
where God seems not to care,
I live everywhere.