Blues For the Soldier Who Told You

Blues for the Soldiers Who Told You

"I'm like a country who can't remember
the last war."
Doug Anderson


They told you that the enemy and the
liberated throng swaddle themselves in
the same robes and rags,
wear the same masks with eyes
that follow you,
pray in the same bewildering tongue,
until your rifle trembles to rake
the faces at every checkpoint.
They told you about the corpse
of a boy or girl rolled at your feet,
hair gray with the powder
of rubble and bombardment,
flies a whirlpool blackening both eyes,
said you¹ll learn the words for apology
too late to join the ceremony,
as flies become the chorus
of your nightmares.
They told you about the double amputee
from your town,
legs lopped off by the blast,
his basketball friend bumping home
in a flag-draped coffin
the cameras will not film anymore,
about veterans who drench themselves
in liquor like monks pouring gasoline
on their heads.

They told you in poems and stories
you did not read, or stopped reading
as your cheeks scorched with
inexplicable fever, and because
they spoke with a clarity that burned
your face, because they saw with the
vision of a telescope revolving around
the earth, they spent years wandering
through jails and bars, exiled to roads
after midnight where gas stations snap
their lights off one by one,
seers unseen at the coffee shop
waiting for bacon and eggs,
calling at 3 AM to say I can't stop
writing and you have to hear this.
You will not hear this, even after
the war is over and the troops drown
in a monsoon of desert flowers
tossed by the crowd, blooming in
their mouths to stop their tongues with
the sweetness of it.

-- Martín Espada

Posted over on Poets Against the War