Holding the brittle pages
Carefully
I follow your terrible
Journey
From Omaha beach
To Czechoslovakia
Through blood and ice
Death the sentence
Before you
And the sentence
Behind you
Death the work of your hands
Death coming for you
Stranger to stranger
The soft flesh
The sweet mouth
The eyes always open
Caught
In the machinery
Of war
The nightmares you won’t lose
Sixty years and more
Still trying to pull us
Down into the foxhole
Out of the line of fire
Mary McCarthy has always been a writer but spent most of her working life as a registered Nurse. She has had work appearing in many on line and print journals, including Third Wednesday, Gnarled Oak, the Ekhprastic Review and Earth’s Daughters. She has an electronic chapbook, Things I Was Told Not to Think About, available as a free download from Praxis Magazine online.
Painting by Teodor Axentowicz.
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