Collateral Damage

by: N. Colwell Snell   

Up from the chimney of December's breath,
out of the chaos of frantic faces,
interval of wind against the upland heath
driving black ashes over stones and grasses,
draped in crackling shrouds and hoods of bone,
the grim ghosts of atrocity return.

Over and again, each small surprise
multiplies itself to a disaster.
I am haunted by the raisin eyes
and fragile body-sway of Anna's sister,
the way her dark hair hung across her face
tameless, and thick, and loose.

Whatever game the anxious mind can conjure,
whatever tale the garlic tongue can spin,
whether to exaggerate or injure,
(pap of gaping wound and fractured bone),
I am pinned beneath the constant weight
incoherent and disconsolate.

Even as the passing years provide
a scabbing over with its purple stain,
the linings of the clouds still bleed
in vivid, bright vermilion,
an on the fading skyline, I see
Anna's sister's hands upturned and empty.

War is kind, the poet says. Suppose
a pot of chicken in a dirt-sick shack,
and a can of soda pop could chase
the phobias away: the shock
of Anna's death, the droning bomber's hover,
the fact that she'll stay twelve years old forever.

December ghosts, April ghosts, they come
year round laced with scum and dung,
they smear their faces with a rancid cream
that reeks of shame and horror, then they hang
their tattered overcoats on splintered pegs
and return to their own vomit like dogs.

But I awake to my own sweat and screams,
over and over the same nightmarish hell
where I'm confronted with the mud-streaked names
of my dead comrades etched in some granite wall,
and sirens blaring subterfuge and lies,
and Anna's sister's blood-shot eyes.