My Battles As a Soldier
Streaking skyward the tracers rip
Into hanging soldiers
Falling about into mayhem
Pulsing through blood-filled ears
Hearing comrades scream
Understanding nothing
This is the war I found…
Hatred filled hardened hunter
Into smashed building
Homes pulverized rubble
Strewn about the decaying mass
The scorched metal burning
Bodies of the fallen men
The miasma of war I forever inhale…
Tigers rolling through billowed flame
Firing upon burnt battlefield blindly
Retreating in terror I leave the voices
Calling as I my boots tamp by arms
Reaching for safety I couldn’t render
Brothers abandoned in the Arnhem snow
These are the ghosts of war who haunt me….
Battle’s percussion on the horizon distant
I fade through the fields upon the Rhein
Farmhouses glow a midnight path
Walking to the beat of gun fire echoes
Off the walls of a shelter a little boy sits
Unafraid of the man feeding him chocolate
In the crater of a bomb…
This flash of hope my salvation from war.
Copyright © Charles Fuller | Year Posted 2006
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