Thursday, July 21, 2022

Requiem over a Farm Field


You poor SOB.

I shot you in the sky so clear.

You weren’t old as I,

By 4 or 5 months not my peer.


You’re in god’s country now.

Forget your old home town.

We’ve planted you among the plow’s

Furrows with a furrowed brow.


War is like this, they have said,

That you and I are born and bred

From different bones in different lands. 

As we must stand for different things

Across the sky we spread our wings


Defending where we mewled our first,

Our milking mother’s mother tongue. 

Alas, it’s all just childhood fun,

And now we cock our guns to fight. 


Beware the church they fit us in,

Our pew of place, our fifth of gin. 

Now smoke is left of you, or me; 

It writes a different family tree. 


We own you now, your hope, your end,

Between the hedgerows, lost to death:

Our measure and our test as men.

We felled you here to bring an end

To war forever, wars that end

Before they’re ever thought again. 


A sunny day like this seems odd

For death and murder high aloft;

We both alive to fly, not fall. 

A different time, we’d have no fight;

Between us only cheers and stout. 


Goodbye, farewell, and keep me well.

Delay the airmen of the grave.

I’ll fly along some more and send

My good regards between good men. 


It couldn’t have been otherwise. 

We came from mothers on other sides. 


John Sevcik


 

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