Memorial Day, 2015

I looked at the records and see that I posted this bit of poetry two years ago, for Memorial Day. I can do no better, two years later.

This is, again, in memory of my friends and comrades who did not come home from Vietnam and for all of us who came home burdened with memories of our war and our losses.

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                                                                 OLD SOLDIERS

                                                         An aged man is but a paltry thing,
                                                         A tattered coat upon a stick…
                                                                            W.B. Yeats

 Old soldiers from all our modern wars
crowd into the same slice of time,
-in Veteran’s Hospitals,
waiting together,
mutely bonded by losses,
-empty spaces that surround
and define us.

Sitting on an uncomfortable island of vinyl
awash in a surf-rolling susurrus of voices,
cocooned inside my silence,
untouched by misery and despair
swirling in the crowded air like cigarette smoke,
stinging exposed nerves.