Toward the Front

This will be a short war,
you tell yourself.
Just keep
the patriotic blood
as red as possible
until it's over. Meanwhile,
you want to appear jaunty,
and reassure the scared ones.
As long as they are not alone
or quiet, you can do this,
even though dread seeps
through every breath
like a stain.
Your company moves across a friendly
green quilt, your homeland but unfamiliar.
These children in the dooryards
of thick-walled houses,
like this one surrounded by fields of rye--
will the grand, heroic rhetoric
and the war that follows it
cross the little brook
and sear them?
Short war, sore feet,
cottage garden, booming battlefield--
your focus hops like a skittish bird.
Where is the center?
The kiss under the cherry tree?
The certainty of combat?
The faith God knows your name?
You march toward the front
and mark each red step.

Chris Nye
From: Poems out of Music
Inspired by Brahms, Sonata for Clarinet and Piano in E flat, Op. 120, No. 2,
second movement

Christopher Nye lives in rural western Massachusetts in the USA, where he works for Orion magazine. Previously he was a professor and college administrator. His poetry has appeared in Snowy Egret, Orbis, Kentucky Poetry Review, Pegasus, Berkshire Review, the online journal Lunarosity, and elsewhere, including anthologies. His children's picture book, The Old Shepherd's Tale, uses the Christmas story to bring a fresh perspective to the treatment of farm animals; it recently came out in a second edition. He will read from his book Poems Out of Thin Air.