When the Men Go Off to War by Victoria Lynn Kelly

Author:Victoria Lynn Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

I’d left him years ago; we fought,

I tore his photograph and never thought

he’d rise up in my dreams again—his young wife gone—

caught in the agony of loss, the desperate prayers

to return the ghosts that catch us unaware.

THE PRAYER FLAG

In a Kalona antique store, my husband

removes the flag from a basement shelf,

unfolds it, recognizes immediately the red

sun and black-inked prayers of someone’s

long-perished son. What soldier it came by

we will never know, but we carry it in tissue

paper onto the wide Iowa streets, the way

some woman in Japan must have carried

that boy’s name in the back of her throat;

and the way, in the middle of another long

war, I would carry my own dead child

inside me, through the glass hospital doors,

toward a sleep hard as a stone angel.

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