Military Poetry

I wrote a poem over the weekend that deals with military issues, and I wanted to share it with you. The poem shares what I sometimes experience as a psychologist treating soldiers who have returned from deployment. Please know that not every session is this intense, but many are. The poem addresses some of the combat traumas I hear, and is not a verbatim experience from any particular soldier.

Inside the Numbers

Fourteen seconds to see your world from
Four inches above sand
Stinking of sewage and cordite.
Eighty meters to your eleven o’clock is the
Birthplace of an ambush where 155mm rounds
Shook and shoved vehicles into ditches and chaos.
Thirty-five words shouted at blast-deafened ears to
Take out the sniper three stories up where a mother and
Her four children huddle unseen
Clutching each other, wide-eyed as random, angry bullets
Slowly find them.
Twenty-eight ragged, scorching breaths (and a thousand years)
To drag your best friend behind a brown, pocked wall
On a meaningless street three hundred years older
Than you’ll ever be.
One continuous scream into a faceless radio mike for medevac
While five pints of blood pump slower from a single throat shot
As your two hands try to stop the crimson flow of broken promises to
Drink more beer than you
Marry your kid sister
Get you back home safe
You stop talking as your hands form fists
Trying to conquer what is rising up in you.
(I wait three minutes in silence)
As you distill two years of guilt and grief
Into tears that collect on my office floor
Defying any attempt to make sense
Of such madness.

__________________________________________________

This second poem is also from my experience of being a therapist for soldiers. In many ways, it is perhaps more revealing of how it feels to do what I do. Sometimes all you can do is bear witness to how these incredibly noble men and women brave everything to get better. I suppose that writing about this is therapeutic for myself. Is so, then thank you for being a witness.

Therapy

As witness
I felt dumbstruck.
Such old tears from
So young a man.
So much loss
So soon.
So much ahead

We laugh our tears.
We dance with death.
We hold our fears
We hold our breath.

“Good work, today”.

Only you and your world have not known good
For some time.

Staring at the floor
Embarrassed by your own emotions
You apologize for tears still fighting
You for expression.

You are not weak.
Only younger
(and)
Older than me
Forever.

________________________________________________

Let me know your thoughts and reactions. Next week, I write about love.