Battle Tales

It is not a day for Poetry-

It is for ripped knees,
scraggly fingers run through
scraggly hair,
and ribbed walls torn
under skies that bled and
seeped their color down,
now bright.


Clouds had stolen the fields, rain-
softened petals,
tears in the crook of a little
nose-
but not the toll of the bells because
they were too heavy, like
crushing stones in a young stomach,
or old bread, not paid for,
tasteless
like his words of the last years of memory
and the passerby that spill silvered suns
into his weathered hat.

And under the cries of his gray eyes,
the explosion of folding uniforms, and
the splitting seams of the earth

How do the people still think they hear poetry?