[Our regularly scheduled B.N. poem—enjoy!]
Three Battles & One Flight
When your Commander tells you, wipe that smile
off your face, you want to explain the faulty
strategies of Jericho, Anzio, or Iwo Jima,
how thin saplings redefine our nobility,
how nothing should be taken and everything given,
how standing in a mine field the echoes of movement
are deafening—
like fish sliding just under the surface
of water, the dead are simple, untheatrical—
The fourteen year-old soldier smokes American cigarettes,
imagines the scents of sex, believes he will
be taken to heaven whole and clean.
They say the pilot is altered
by the sky—at times the horizon means nothing
and there is not enough fuel to go home. Like a
child practicing his scales at the piano—
he wants to go higher.
B.N.
© to the author 1983-2010
Three Battles & One Flight appeared previously in the Memphis State Review