The Medic
The blast wind burns your face but you can see the pavement seem to rise, a fistic bloom,
and then the sound that stops all sound—debris
falls in an angry rain through dust, and soon
you can gather the clues of what you are.
Then procedure becomes your prayer and shield:
both legs gone, so tourniquets, then morphine for
basilic vein, stretcher to nearest field,
Then the wait, the wait for the chopper out.
Now you’re grateful for this ringing deafness;
You’re too weak to suffer the cries and shouts
You keep the task before you, the process,
but alone, you recall the good whole man
Then the panic, the fear, these shaking hands.
The Insurgent
No one saw him climb over the Hesco
barriers, so he just appeared and walked
under the lights where no one ever goes.
An actor who moves in my sleep, he talked
to the air, his hands tucked under his arms.
A boy who might have been cold or wired.
A cattle herder from the nearby farms
or Taliban out to plant an IED.
We knew the protocol of escalation,
hand signals, warning shots, the distance limit.
He walked, we fired—what was termed a precaution.
The boy was deaf, we learned, and slow-witted.
He was born the way we had learned to be.
No wind could lift that bloodied sand to sea