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Distant Echoes |
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Distant echoes come wafting over far
hills and plain
Rushing, hurtling, rising on prevailing winds
Peace sounding with hollow, bitter pain
Crowned everlasting free from death climactic sends.
Young men too oft ride war swells rising crescendo
Swim in tempestuous tides of life never ending
Enraptured by past allures of glories empty echo
Earning now a lost promise young lives rending.
Brave men hear the congregation crying the lost echo
Yet mortal mouths cannot from their heart still its cries
Falling to earth like proverbial walls of Jericho
Death promoted by the master of lies.
War exists as nature's contrast to suckling her young
Hatreds nourished by evil's foul breath narcotic.
Babelled lashings heard of the devil's tongue
Rhetoric fueling dueling guns to a fetal life bombastic.
Remember to your dying day your call to arms
So young, so innocent, so naive, so foolishly brave
Going gung-ho into a cacophony of harms
Discordant freedom's of the world to save.
Mortal differences intolerant war depraves
Hatreds fomenting, floating, on stagnant air solemn still
Blitzing thunder ushering mankind back to his caves
To hear ringing, singing, anxieties primal shrill.
Funerary sounds echo mournfully somber
Ancient survivals still clash in a warrior's ear heard
War's lustful eye pondering, always remember
Time... brothers lost lingering, in killings absurd.
Now older, grayer, still... back humping that hill
Distant echoes still beat in hearts of men
Oft times when the day dawns hot and still
Still back there fighting in the heart of Vietnam.
Traverse again the devil's portal
Scalps tingle, fearing men coming to kill
Wax again on fateful war's coincidental
Dread accompanied by demon dregs of ill will.
O bang the drums slowly
Honor the boy with that thousand yard stare.
Bear his solemn message to soldiers living restlessly
A soldier's life-blood boils, forever back there. |
By
Gary Jacobson
Copyright 2003
Listed
July 6, 2010 |
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About
Author...
In 1966-67, Gary Jacobson served with B Co
2nd/7th 1st Air Cavalry in Vietnam as a combat
infantryman and is the recipient of the Purple
Heart.
Gary, who resides in Idaho writes stories he
hopes are never forgotten, perhaps compelled by
a Vietnamese legend that says, "All poets are
full of silver threads that rise inside them as
the moon grows large." So Gary says he
writes because "It is that these silver
threads are words poking at me � I must let them
out. I must! I write for my brothers who cannot
bear to talk of what they've seen and to educate
those who haven't the foggiest idea about the
effect that the horrors of war have on
boys-next-door."
Visit Gary Jacobson's site for more information
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