Friday poem

I'm posting an original poem every week for a year. This is 22/52 (I think). A war poem for my father.

River

In my dream

the creek whittles to a rill day by day, stranding

bowfin and gar in shallowing sloughs.

The drought claims most of our crops and

our laurel hills darken to sienna.

I was twelve then and as green as buckthorn. Now I am twenty-three,

made an old man by my rifle, my bayonet, this cartridge belt.

I awaken in my foxhole, unsure where I begin and the sodden earth ends. The constant

rain rides in on a volley of shells, fragments caroming as if carrying a message just for me.

Sometimes the shelling stops and the rain stops and the jungle is quiet.

I can hear the rush of the Matanikau River just through those trees, its broad delta promising to redden with blood at sunrise.

In the quiet I can make out voices on both sides of the river,

Japanese and English,

hushed as a secret but sighing the same word.

The dying never ask for help;

we're far from our factory towns and farmlands and simple villages and

the caress of a mother's hand on our brow.

The dying ask for water. Soon they will receive it, their prayers answered

a hundredfold, when the monsoon makes up its mind to shell us again, and they

drink their fill from above.

Tonight the riverbank will overflow and deliver their sated bodies to the sea,

sailing again for home.