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.