A Veteran’s Day Prose Poem

Only the  Dead

 

At first, the men of the burial battalion had tried to bury the dead.  

They dug big trenches and deep ditches, and threw the bodies in, and covered them with lime.  

Then, the chaplain came and prayed over them, and told the dead they would always be remembered and that when the war was over their bodies would be dug up again and taken back home and re-buried where their mothers and fathers and sweethearts could pray and cry and tremble over them, and where Jesus would find them when he came on his golden chariot at the end of time. 

But then the whistling bombs and shrapnel started falling and the bodies and graves became unstuck, and the explosives churned them up like mashed potatoes, churned them into a brown and gray muck of decaying bodies and mud.  

And now the ground was frozen, and the burial battalion was gone, and the chaplain was dead or busy somewhere else praying over the dying who would soon be lying like the others on the frozen ground waiting for the snow to blow over them.

— 

From my novel Retreat — a love story.