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War and Tragedy

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Contributor: Gary Jacobson || Poem Categories

The End of the Beginning country as flag
Is this the beautiful morning given for me to die?
On patrol scanning the horizon for Charlies
Thirty minutes before among primrosed grasses I shattered lie
Thirty minutes before suffering life and death's grand indignities
Thirty minutes before the mortal end of earthly sight
Sweet-and-sour winds sing sweetest lullabies
Before my soul banana-wood greenery's bedight
Sending a weary soul hovering mid soft blown skies.

Nam's palm frond foliage shades my aching head
Eyes closed in sweetest serenity
As wispy clouds line my feathered bed
Embracing eternal harmony...
Not alive, but neither dead
My shrouded being floating above my essence
Torn from my soldier's blood
Bringing sweet obsolescence
To spirit wrung out of Nam's cankered mud.

Quiet peace all round is now all I know
Wrought through times of pain and torment
No longer a pawn of bestial war raging below
At rest above verdurous firmament
Vestiges of life seeping in and out through my soul
I was never really part of it, so do not lament
Never have I known such a calm tranquility
As when standing at the door of all eternity.
By Gary Jacobson
Copyright 2002
Listed October 25, 2010
Author's note: When I thought I'd died

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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War and Tragedy Poems | Poem Categories