Ambrosial Eyes Your ambrosial eyes say you’re hypnotized you’re as distant as the moon. They gaze so far like a burning star, you envision your platoon. For a second the present is gone, you’ve gone to something from your past, accepting an old vision of distaste, the wraith has brought you back. Playing cards at a table with the men you were assigned. The details of your brothers are completely lucent in your mind. A cut off shirt on Shiltzy, that tat around his arm, Snider drags from his half lit cigarette and then lays down his card. Rathbun is telling jokes; the big talker knows he’ll win. Then LT comes into the hooch as says its time again. We’re rolling down a pitch back road doing sixty five. The enemy is watching us waiting for the time. You know it comes before it hits, then you see the light. Percussion follows with a thunderous boom will you live or die? Yelling on the radio is everyone okay? One by one they answer some, but then a silence comes to play. 2 trucks down, 3 trucks down sometimes even four. The ambush hit your convoy and your heart it hits the floor. Screaming on the handset and gun fire heard behind. Calling in a medevac you try to keep your shit in line. Helicopters flying in, lighting the night sky, with tracer rounds, that shock and awe, devastating your frontline. You hear bullets whizzing by your head like the fourth of July, a thud of lead to metal cracks the truck you just walked by. Rathbun gives you the status report, Shilts has got my six. Casualty reports are coming in for your losses on this trip. Waiting for the names, you know they must be coming, then a tap on my side and I see my wife checking on her husband. It was all a dream, come back to me; your family needs your loving. I wipe the sweat from my brow, and tell her that I’m fine. I look at the clock and realize I was on a 30 minute ride. I sit in silence brush it off look at my kids and grin. I can’t tell them where I was, or exactly where I’ve been. I struggle with my focus to keep it all on them, so I don’t go back to the hell of the attack, that my brain is always in. As days will come I’m always caught by my historic moments, Ill embrace my visions with sovereignty, remember my brothers as they stare at me, so poetic and heroic.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 11:18:51 +0000