Revisiting Histories of the Soil

I was here before
in the whipping of rifle bullets across the meadow
where my cards spilled out on tree stumps and the
archaic language spoke in oak and shaded leaves.

Forlorn pleasures, say the apathetic-critical,
as they watched the leather soldiers slide
the cartridge into the bolt-chamber of older weapons.

Madness, say the high-flung literati
ensconced in comforts stolen from the rooms of children.

Fire, say the poets, pure and simply cascading sheets of flame
called the imagination in working whirls through out the
cryptograms of the world's languages, bedecked in ambiances
of lore's lust that speaks in glowing heat's edges with
smoke and light.

But I just wanted to be
a thousand thoughts of childhood
running like rivers over the small stones
of buried memories.

A million questions
more questions than their bullets
and bombs, words that lingered
on wind's notebook spirals
long after MLK was shot on
the hotel balcony,
long after prison bars stripped
Debs of his politics,
long after love had made hard writers
soft with death and brittle with impossible
standards of survival.

Was there love in Dachau?
Daring intelligence in a Black Maria?
Punctuations of truth underlying the
machinegun-typewriter staccato of
the world at war with itself?
Did the gods of questions
billow in the throats of man
like rivers of wine as their
blood splattered in rivulets
as dark as Roman sentences,
formed for the machineries of war
and not mere literacy?

Of course, but you rarely hear
such stories. Forlorn and in solitude
it is possible to contemplate
the great gaps of history.
Rifle shots make life appear as a battle,
and few accounts of World War II
will mention cherry-stains or
cabbage fields, or the simplicity
of a family in an old farm house untouched
by conflict who carry out their small kindnesses
without bearing the tragedies of the world.

We touched, during stereotypical Christmas,
when the essence of home reanimated us from
the gravel trenches and pulled us from square
dugouts, singing canticles loud enough to drown
out artillery. No-mans land quit vomiting Earth,
spirals of barbed wire became ribbons curling
in the morning mists. Our dead kinsmen rested
in the peace of meadows, letters from home
nestled in field jackets and the gaze of the
eternal nestled in their eyes. "We were
the happiest men alive in our day."