PTSD: THE SILENT GUNS

The Silent Guns
Age 6 - 56, the decades 1950-2000
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?...
No prayers nor bells...save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells
~ Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" ~
(killed November 4, 1918, during fighting in northern France)

In 1918
on the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day
of the eleventh month

the guns stopped firing

a soldier said
the silence was deafening
he was not being poetic

later my father came home to a normal world
that could no longer return to normal for him

caught between bouncing grenades
rolling down concrete steps
caught between the split second
that it took for his lieutenant
to toss them back
as they flashed and filled the air
with smoke and shards -
my father had been captured

at home, his capture remained
he had trouble holding a job, a marriage
finishing what he started

in New York
surrounded by rush hour crowds
he heard the scream
of an express subway
and dove down onto the platform
thinking that the screeching rails
were incoming shells

his family called him the 'artful dodger'
behind his back

he would have been better off
if he had lost an arm or a leg
but with no scars
it was left to me

like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner
he recited his story over and over
and I learned it word for word
as I grew up

too young I could only sense
the wrongs that had been done to him
ones that he, himself, did not understand

so the shadow of that war
also marked me
with nightmares of mud, poison gas,
and corpses in No Man's Land

as I looked for answers
far into my adult years