(Dedicated to my brother Michael and his brother and sister warriors.)

  Young men shed blood.
    Old men shed tears.
                Thomas D. Norris - 2009


For the Soldiers
      By JoHannah P. Green

A ghost among us,
shuffling
along the edge
of the street;
dark,
bent,
he is watching
for lost coins,
and cigarettes
cast down
with one drag left.
He looks like crumpled newspaper,
ragged, dirty,
stained yellow, brown and gray.
His eyes hold phantoms
in fatigues
stained crimson.

We go in the restaurant
and close the door
to block out
his spectral face - seamed,
scarred and scary,
worn and tired.
So hard
to imagine what he has seen;
jungle or desert,
soaked in blood.

He has killed
because we told him
it was the only way
to deliver us from evil.
We cut him off,
separated him from his
family,
from his humanity
from his soul.
We ordered him to break
the rules of God.
We gave him brothers
and sisters in arms,
then made him watch them die
in deserts and jungles.
We told him it was
a hero's death,
but gave them/give him no Valhalla.

Now he fights
to survive
the nightmares,
to find a place to stand
a place to sleep
untroubled.
Now
on this edge
of the street,
he stares down
unable to find his life again,
separated by us
from both the world of his kind
and the world he has protected.

Oh, Warrior-heart,
what have we done to you?