Robert Trezise Jr. Poet Free verse

War Crimes

The 90 year old
Could no longer bend or even lean
Over
His brother’s grave

Stands in the sun with his planted cane

At his elbow

Tells me
He hears his brother speak from the grass
“Bobby, where have you been all these years?”

Dad turns to me
Says when he was 13
And the Army telegram arrived at the house
And his mother and father tore it open
On the Roosevelt porch

He ran down Sutherland Street to downtown Ironwood
With shock if not even a grin
Wired across his face

Shouting from the Walnut-split sidewalks
“My brother’s been killed! My brother’s been killed!”

Haunted
By his youthful exuberance 
For all his old days thereafter

Thought he was responsible
For his mother losing her hair
Nest unraveled by a storm

For his father
Never using a razor again
Instead, each morning
Rubbing expressions clean in the sink
With his palms

For the only thing
Left standing
In this near-abandoned mining town

A fifty foot fiberglass statute
Of Chief Hiawatha
Gazing over the passage of centuries

Never lets go of any soul
No matter the crimes against humanity.

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