War Victim

War Victim


It changed him.

The manchild gone to war and death never came home.
Home to a wife he couldn't love in ways she longed for,
home to sons and daughters who looked for affection
openly and demanded a reckoning of his parenthood's
rationed care.

High overlooking the carnage and finding nothing
they could grasp, they left - - angry and injured.

He's grown into an old man, but still he is the boy gone to war.
Never spoken--the things he did and saw as a manchild
lost in the war he fights in the days of his mind.

With swollen belly and shrunken soul,
he lives a death seen but never felt.
Heard but never lived.

He's log strong but inflexible.
Never able to say I love you.
Never able to say.

Marked with Cain's hidden tragedy, wandering a
wasteland peopled with suited shirts and narrow-minded chanting,
he seeks an oblivion that is never afforded him.
Just to be left alone with his wooden store-indian heart - - hard and brittle.

He shatters under the demands of fatherhood.

Now his children grow into the hole-hearted
wasteland his living leaves them and find,
that they too are war victims. Victims of a war gone
long before the midnight struggle spawned them.

There in the moonless dark that spares the barricaded assault,
they hide defeated.

Pills and liquors their only solace,

they look to their children's rooms and wonder about coming war.

~Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner~