Combat Fatigue

The farm pond is a glass eye.
Set in the scarred face of fallow acres
wrapping his inherited house, it gleams
on winter nights under the boot-black sky—
his late-life world, a frozen battlefield
of sawtooth trees and rugged open pasture.
Mirrored, the water and moon lay so still
they almost whisper, dying.

Once a warrior—his own left eye is known
to rotate wildly in the telling of stories
he takes out like tobacco to spew angry grief
as spit: mud, mortars, firefights, pain.
His listening grandchildren wince—comrades
huddled in the bunker of his porch sofa,
afraid to move, hoping for an easy end
to the muddled mess of blood and guts.

Sometimes he rages hours until he falters, falls
asleep, twitching as he dreams his way back
to the land of the living—this piece of red dirt
and these kids, his proof he made it out alive…
but on good nights, when the stars are golden omens,
he laughs his way to tears, remembering his pa,
a man who never loved home, but always came back
to his boy, his son, his brave little soldier.

by Anne McCrady

NEWS LINKS: Reuters, CNN, AP, FOXNEWS

AUDIOLINK: SoundCloud

Poet with a Press Pass is a series of original poems of witness in response to world news,
written in real time by Anne McCrady and produced by InSpiritry at poetwithapresspass.com