Soldier's Song

By Ben Weakley

More life exists in the tip
of a bullet smacking
the concrete wall
beside your head

than in a decade spent
commuting to work in traffic,
paying the mortgage on time,
loving a woman and her children,
and taking vacations at the beach.

There is more breath and sweat,
more pulse
and dilating pupil
in the intimate space between
shock wave and steel
debris than you could find
in any lover’s fingers.

There is more enlightenment
in the dust cloud
rising from broken asphalt
to drag you underneath
the opened ground
than in a hundred years
of anything else in this life
or the next.

Those who have come close enough
to kiss the painted mask of death –

they have seen millennia.

****

After fourteen years in the U.S. Army, Ben Weakley moved with his family to Northeast Tennessee, where he lives, works, and writes. His poetry won first place in the 2019 Heroes’ Voices National Poetry Contest and has been published in The Ekphrastic Review and Modern Haiku.