Featured Poet -  Martin Willitts Jr

THE UNSEEN DISTURBANCE

Horses pace slowly in the back fields.

Someone must be dying;

they feel sadness in the air.

I lean against this lesson about love, 

that when we die, someone grieves,

the world notices. I walk as a whisper.

They breathe out grief. I must calm them.

I must also calm you, as your heart rushes about madly,

trying to channel the dead back.

If we love intensely, we grieve.

Moonlight can’t quench loss.

The dead ride into another place.

Bringing the horses in from the great distance 

does not mean waiting for the dead to return.

Sadness marks hoofprints in our hearts.

The anguish-fields stretch far beyond reach.

The horses cannot stand still. They hear you keening

among the vacant trees, into the empty skies.

I try to ginger the horses, stroking their mane. I keep vigil.

I must also ease the atmosphere around you,

let you release your thousand horses of grief.

HEARING INDIRECTLY MY SON NEEDS DRUG REHAB

I must break down what I hear 

into manageable, bite-size pieces.

I did not expect to be uprooted by this news —

it hurts to hear it, 

it turns on lights inside the house of my heart,

until I murmur with answers —

let him go, let him go, let him find his own solution.

And then the darkness releases its grip on my world,

stops staring with its brooding eyes,

as I blow out the Puritan self-examination

of what I might have done wrong as a parent.

I toss out my concerns. The darkness notices

a blue light emanating from my body. And yes,

the darkness trembles, thrown back on its haunches,

as I release. 

At last, at last, my heart blossoms, hovers over the horizon

as if from a white magnolia flower. 

I focus on healing. 

Its work is never easy, but the darkness goes 

so far away, it can never come back inside me. 

Perhaps, someday my son will recover his own way. 

THE GRIEF COUNSELOR

It began with the first war wounded I brought back 

as a medic, when he realized that he wasn’t going to make it

because the surgeons moved on. He asked me 

to write his wife and children about his death.

How do I put such words into action? I began

as if passing out scalpels. At first, words were sluggish

like the double-yoke water buffalos in Vietnam.

Each word arrived easier, as I eased into the explanation.

I do not recall what I wrote. My heart shattered into rice.

So many peace doves flew into my pen. 

I looked at the family picture of his wife, 

his ten-year old daughter, the letter informing him 

that he would be discharged soon. The word “soon” hurt.

Explaining to a child was the hardest letter.

Sure, they would get a form letter from the government, 

impersonal and impassionate. I couldn’t allow 

the dead to not be able to pass on a message.

I would see many more letters exactly the same, 

more pictures of girlfriends, wives, parents. 

The word “soon” always arrived too late. 

So many blank letters to fill and send, 

trying to make sense out of the senselessness of war.

Letters about the ones never coming back, 

countless letters, sometimes reporting missing limbs,

about attaching prothesis. Too many one-way letters,

but occasionally, someone would write back 

thanking me for my kindness to their loved one.

After a while, I got better at addressing grief, 

because often I was the one that carried them back.

I was the one helping with surgery, the one 

zipping body bags, looking for name tags.

A lot of the return letters asked how to stop war, 

its unstoppable nature. I suggested

contact a legislator, join a protest movement, 

stuff I was not supposed to suggest. 

I couldn’t answer any other way.