Mindsinger

 

Life was not always like this for me, you know.

There was a time – oh there was a time!

I marched with the best of them!

 

I flew those silver birds through hell

and brought them back every time.

Life was not always like this.

 

Sometimes I remember things.

Like the time I found those pups

only a couple weeks old

suckling their dead mother

at the bottom of a foxhole.

 

I cried as I drowned those pups.

I wanted to be back on that Indiana farm

where I cold raise those warm, wiggly buggers

and make coon dogs of them!

God, how I wanted that!

 

I remember shooting the enemy

and seeing around his neck

a gold locket.

Then having to get up and fire again

to keep that piece of real estate

on our side of the front.

 

I remember the men, good, bad, brave, weak,

who shared that life and made it special.

Ah, we had us some times!

 

What’s that, you say?

What am I doing here?

I don’t’ know.

Sometimes, I think I’m trying to forget.

But mostly, I guess, I’m trying to remember

that time when life itself was a battle.

 

I wait for those spaces when the whiskey fog lifts

and the reality of a civilized world closes in.

Those minutes when I seem once again

to be the master of my fate.

When the lives of my men and the fate of a world

rested on the tip of a carbine.

Or when these red eyes saw the world

from the blue skies.

when life meant something.

No, life was not always like this.

 

c.2011 Donna Swanson