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Marc B. Adin
Ringing
A distant reflection upon youth, war and joy.
my neck arched back
and i was filled by the shades of
blue
which consumed the sky.
the deepest in the center,
glowing.
the rushing air was reeling,
in an omnipresent moment of joyful life.
i was happy as only a young soldier
in war can be.
a voice broke my reverie in a wink,
as if disembodied and
a forgotten child warn warrior spoke: "brother."
but no longer am i a soldier,
and the years have brought
me down,
yet, still, i hear the ringing sounds
imprisoned in my head.
i feared that death would find me early in the spring,
even though youthful immortality lingered
as delicate delusion in the hallucinatory
space between sleep and haste.
all the happy days have been drained of tint and hue
since those that blossomed
into fireballs.
we were exhilarated
extinguishers of those
who sought our death,
and never would we be more joyful
than when we stood in victory.
the conqueror of enemy and its ally, fear.
now, in the misting winter's cold,
i find myself lost
and confused,
not as when i was a soldier,
so young, so strong, so jubilant.
those days, long shadows past,
have never left me, nor i them,
as if i were a permanent alien,
never to go home again.
thus, it is that i am compelled
to leave you a small token of memory tattered,
and wandered.
so far distant,
and so far from chaotic tempo,
that you may understand
why i always was a stranger here
anguished, solitary and bemasked
in covert mockery.
"brother."
i brought my head forward, and i saw the drained face
and rouged wounds yet to be.
skin bereft of color,
blondest of hair,
eyes the palest fade of blue,
we strode the earth
as uniformed giants
lazily asking,
"where are you going?"
"what are you doing?"
as actors we froze
both truth and lies
in place.
there would be others to follow
who would sort the corpses
into right and vanished, lucky and lost.
we mighty troopers, heroic icons
of the singular face of truth,
hurtled down the red clay road
armed and hunting,
with an aura,
a crown of
Death and Destruction painted on our souls,
the fearsome crimson wind announced us so.
this was what we promised
to bring to those who dared defy us.
the bleached human skull, the jaunty sign,
proclaimed our presence for all to dread.
we were alive and we were happy,
as if we reached for immortality
and felt her within our grasp.
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