The Long March Home

It strikes me funny that at the end of life, it doesn’t matter what uniform we wore.

And so I did nothing, stuck in limbo as the world exploded an ocean away.

You left without a single word. How could you?

Because if the size of my world is no wider than her smile, that’s big enough for me

I’ve seen men sit down hard with bullet wounds, talk for a little while like they were only stunned, and die two minutes later. Soldiers blown to more pieces than can be scraped together in a box. Barrios of civilians bombed to nothing just because they were in the way.

Ain’t no Army coming to save us. The war’s all turned to the Nazis now. President’s clean forgotten us. You and I don’t even exist

We stumble into the road to stare after the truck. A few minutes later a few Filipino soldiers come marching in its wake, Farther on, someone’s blowing a whistle and I can’t believe what I’m hearing: ‘Cease fire, cease fire!’ It don’t seem possible that after the horror of all we’ve been through, a war can end with a whistle and two words

They’re skinnier and dirtier than I remember—walking skeletons with skin sagging from their bones. Souls staring out from their human remains, waiting to be released.