When the War Vets Return
They have only one request: Don’t talk
about whether or not the war is good or bad.
So when they return from Iraq or Afghanistan,
we talk only about the trees, the elms,
the green explosions that fill the sky above our houses day and night,
protecting our children from storms.
Talk only about the begonias in the back yard,
like the ones tended by the soldiers’ wives day after day
as they stoop over with copper watering cans
that poured out a stream as clear as their wedding day.
Talk only about the way their wives wiped the mud from their feet
as they stepped, barefoot, back into the empty house.
There, their pink toes curled beneath the white sheets—toes
that, even as the wives slept,
dreamed of walking down a sandy road toward a distant desert,
the mirage of water spreading across it, creating
what should have been a lake, but wasn’t.
The wives gazed out at their husbands,
dressed in fatigues, who lay in small rafts and
waved at them as they floated toward the far shore.
The wives called out to them with a small word or two,
but were not sure if they were
heard or not.
Let us say, then, that the war vets’ one request is fulfilled.
We will not talk about the war, whether it’s good or bad.
We will not talk about the shattered faces of the refugees.
We’ll let our words travel
elsewhere, past the fading green lawns of our
back yards that wait, like dry sponges,
to soak up a rainstorm.
The words will travel to small towns at three a.m., where,
in the all-night cafes, patrons turn their backs
to the black and white hiss of tiny televisions.
The words will travel across the state lines
to our own deserts—Arizona and New Mexico and Death Valley—
those American lands we never knew were so dry,
and yet so close to home.
They’ll travel to those parched lands,
etched with lines like the cupped palm of a huge hand,
a hand which will open for the words,
letting them pool into its hollows,
and then close on them slowly,
silencing them.
Bill Meissner
