In Your Navy Uniform, Standing in the Grass

Forty years before you wrote your own end,
before you did your worst in a spoiled field,
before you drew from our swollen eyes
your own greedy tears -- left us searching,
sifting for answers among your sullen gray ash
-- before all this, you posed for a photograph.

On our dusty white window sill, your photograph
now rests. We keep you far away from the end
and near to the others -- the smiling faces now ash
or bone, soil or cypress. Guards and citizens in a field
of ancient stone. But for them, we are not searching
for meaning, clarity or life behind their eyes.

They see us and we return their gaze, but your eyes,
lost in the shadow of your brow, lost to a photograph
and to us -- your eyes, where are they? Searching
for something clean? A great escape? A winning end
to a losing life? Your eyes, they found a lonely field,
an outraged family, a shattered son, a broken body of ash.

Once a soldier, a father. Now 6 lbs. of pointless ash
on the wind, the leaves. We'll never know -- our eyes
and our minds -- never know why. Why that fucking field
instead of our arms? Why a God damn photograph
instead of our home? Who said you could choose your end
and send my father south to join the others already searching

for you? No one said a thing, I suppose. And no searching,
sifting or slamming our fists to the dirt will change ash
to a man -- a Grandfather. So we bury our questions. We end
our self-righteous suffering and look to our dreams for your eyes,
your weathered hands, cracked smile. All that a photograph
can not, will not provide. It's not enough to make that field

disappear. But it is something. It's re-tilling a tainted field,
planting sweet-pea and peony. Sending the cypress searching
for a new place to weep. It's holding your photograph
with both hands, thinking not what could have been -- not of ash,
but of a caring man -- strict and stern yes, with fierce eyes
that crumble. A man who maybe loved too much in the end.

All that remains is a photograph, a memory, the outline of a field
somewhere. And in the end, we're still, all of us, left searching,
sifting through the ash, trying to find your eyes.

-jkh