Stranger
My end begins aimless
Nothing led by my steps
But my death led to greatness
So it was foretold. . . honor
Among my strangers
The graves dug around me grew numerous
Like flies to a corpse, rotten and forgotten above
My stone is headed but by one line,
“Honor was his path for he
Was washed in the grace of God.”
Among the aimless, the found
The dead and alive,
The named and forgotten
We are all but strangers
Using blood as our tag
The bodies laid before me are rinsed out and emptied
Lacking flesh and blood stained now with dirt
Upon the remains of, now forever wandering
Now nothing remains but a freshly painted slate
Of men who were strangers to themselves
The pond lies still,
Before me is a face
Bore with two holes
With a third above the left brow
“My God. . .” I said, “My God.”
Those golden fields once thought to be my reward
Was but a fantasy implanted long, long ago
Dying with honor without ever knowing my own name
And now I lay wake cold with fellow strangers
Who too were stuffed, and then hollowed
The wind frozen
The sun burnt
The grass dead
The rain flooded
The bodies gone
I misunderstood every trial before me
Before I knew who, I was there and gone
My reflection remains empty
As my body turns to ash in the sudden wake of mine
The singularity that was my life – nothing.
“I am a stranger,
I was gone before I was there.
I was dead before
The great fire of life–
Burning away
Down an endless path.
My name is null,
My body is used,
And here I lie before life
Before I ever knew
Who I was meant to be, and
Who my fellow strangers were. . .”
Copyright © Joshua ST | Year Posted 2025
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