I turn the lamp-wick up, and through the wine
I watch the steel remember what it was—
a flash of edge that split the northern wind,
now dull with rust I breathe on, rub, and squint.
The bugles drift across my closing lids:
a camp of torches, horses stamping frost,
and from the general's tent, the smell of beef
turning on spits, while captured lutes are strummed
with barbarous tunes that shake the tents and stars.
The muster-field lies level in the fall,
a floor of dry leaves waiting for the weight
of ten thousand boots, and every boot
a man who knows he'll not come back this way.
My horse—I called him Lightning—had a hoof
that struck the earth like prophecy, and shod
with iron that sparked against the flint of war.
My bow was terror; when I drew the string,
it sang like oaks uprooted in a gale,
and every arrow found its home in silence.
For what? For Caesar? For the gilded throne?
For laurels that would wilt before I reached
the gates of home? I broke the enemy's spine,
I burned their flags, I gave my king a peace
he did not earn. They carved my name in stone—
but stone, my friend, remembers nothing.
Not the cold.
Not the widow's face.
Not the one friend whose body I could not carry back.
And now?
The lamp sputters. The wine is gone. The blade
is sharper than the man who holds it. Look—
my hands, that once could loose a thousand shafts,
now tremble at the weight of this one sword.
My hair, that once was raven as the night
I rode through screaming arrows, catches light
like winter's first betrayal on the hill.
I did not know that glory had a price
beyond the blood I paid. It costs the years
you cannot spend, the sons you never held,
the mornings when you wake and cannot name
the face beside you. All the trumpets fade,
and what is left? A blade. A lamp. A man
who stares at both, and sees in both the same
cold gleam of things that outlast what they serve.
So drink, you ghosts of comrades. Drink with me.
The war is over. I am the only one
who did not die—and that is the worst wound.
