warpoet
soldiers | afghanistan smsteele
infantry deployment war leaving being
So Beautiful
For You At The Shura for AK, مكيلع مالسلا (peace be upon you)
for MCpl. G, 1PPCLI
The Many Men So Beautiful
my pen has drunk from knowledge Rumi
Men marched, they kept equal step. Men marched, they were nurtured together. David Jones, In Parenthesis
I watch you infantryman so gucci in the Suffield dust your body turned by a year of sweat duress, Karl G sleeplessness, like liquid glass blown gaudy in the white-hot war furnace into something steely, fragile, precious. Your bed, the inside of your head nodding into your frag vest, mother LAV humming hot then cold,
Golden, soldier, Asaleem ‘Alaykum , helmet off, frag vest on, cross-legged you sit on rose petals, Persia’s carpets, beside terps, behind elders, your OC—
the outer ring of a stone dropped in a wadi . Cups of steaming mint tea, scooped qabuli . Moons of naan torn and eaten with gun hands. Cigarillos passed, orbit Afghanistan. Speak Pashto softly. Soft knock the circle, your third tour of this broken, beautiful land. 26 year old, MCpl. A man. Full. Though innocent wisdom comes, goes. Like black storks, through drought, boredom, adrenaline, the metal rain,
while Cpl. Zee on sentry blows cigarillo halos at emerald worlds of infra-red, thermals, watching watching arcs right arcs left, ghostly glows coyotes creeping tall prairie grass. You, zenith of man at 26, face sooted green with live-fire, two-tour-old-guy-eyes in young man’s skin, I’ll think of you when you go over again, your pencil, your pen, your sketchpad falling from your sleeping hand;
Kohl-eyed angels of burka , the shalwar kameez , watch over you in the desert again. I know.
I’ll think of you, the bitching brothers, sleeping upright in the belly of the LAV shoulder-to-shoulder, knee-to-knee crammed, doing time in cell-phone-Bible-land, I’ll think of you, all of you, ‘til the Herc lands and most of you come marching home again.
smsteele is a poet with the Canadian Forces Artist Programme who has spent a year with 1st Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and the 2 Royal 22e Régiment at CFB Edmonton, CFB Shilo, CFB Suffield, CFB Wainwright and is currently in Kandahar with Task Force 3-09. www.warpoet.ca
26 On Site review 22: WAR
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