skipping pebbles together

(written on Wednesday, January 23, 2008, right after daybreak)

I watched him
frailly skip flat pebbles
two times or three
before they fell below
a slow, quiet flow of the river.

He told me
Granddad had taught him
what stones skipped best
and how to whip the arm just so
when they’d gone fishing
for catfish when
he was a boy.

He told me
when he’d dug
foxholes in shaking hillsides
in Italy during the war,
the pebbles he’d found
in stream beds below
would click in his pocket.
That he always kept a half pocketful
to skip in solitary moments
when away from the agitation
of the killing of boys his age
and a slow smooth stream
could be found
to remind him of home.

His war’s gone and so is mine.
We’ve not forgotten though
a peace that joins us
in skipping pebbles
quietly by ourselves.

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homeless

(written on Tuesday, February 22, 2005, early in the morning)

Come out and play, they said.
We’ll see if we can bat grenades
over the red river with the butts of rifles.
The bayonets are sheathed
so our swings won’t bloody the bases
from cuts in our bellies.

This isn’t the game I played, I said,
when wee kids wrapped a broken ball with tape
and hit it with a naily Louisville slugger
and ran paths in the grass
to laughing collisions at home.

Come on, they said.
We’ll clear a field of corpses
and run round the red sucking mud.
No, I can’t, I said.
I’ve lost my legs for running fun,
and you’ve no home to return to.

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