Balkan Winter

 

 

            Solid iron files its humans

With projectile vomit of led,

You cannot stop it,

You cannot block it when

You bare no arms or jacket for

Self defence.

 

            The interrogator questions

Thick and fast and past life, lives

Wives enter your thoughts of how

Inconsequential you are,

Thoughts that, as human, they

                        Want dead!

 

            Out there,

            Out there is a round

Going around and around and around

The globe;

                        My name engraved

Glowing bright and red the closer it gets,

            But in here,

            In here,

Is the heart that weighs heavy from

Burden of looking through all those years,

The PTSD magnificent in its victory –

Yet it is I who lives to tell the tale.

 

My sale of courage from this now

Empty shell reveals the shoulders

Shake for each and every winter,

My Christmas chin strapped by a quiver,

No adorning VC,

                        My days as soldier;

A brief history of lies.

 

 

Michael J Waite 0348hrs. Sunday 7^th February 2010.