Hospital Blues 08/01/2021

At parade the whole are evidence
for motherlands, of rightness
no broken thoughts for men like these
displayed at church
ordered with no thought
in buildings they do not understand.

In distant rooms the fractured sleep
the phantom limbs made real in dreams
of love and Saturdays in spring
the screams of their arrival still echoing
and the edge of war in wounds
that weep as mothers weep.

At watch, the VADs keep station,
no more than girls, pressed with rhetoric
by agencies they cannot translate
to play or to ambition
and old men have entrenched this mode
of feigning truth with children

since talk was talk and war became a toy
the pressing of one's truth
outside survival, beyond shelter
beyond food and love and need
into imagined height and power
marked with tin and iron stars.

The old men mapped the mud of Europe
with blood and treasure
the ragged entrails of a generation
burned to ash or brought home mad
pegging out the gold fields
for the pickings of the victors.