Finally
He dreams while awake
of a hammock once tied
between two blue spruce
that should not have been
there either but they were.
A puzzle of sorts
like the, "why?"
and, "what for?",
that became the first
fragments of reason
he killed. A hammock
strung between pines
when they were there,
which was not often
but was strange to find
in a jungle, quite welcome
in a jungle else sleep in cold mud.
A hammock he won
off a lost Asian son
because you took
what you needed
back then. No questions
were asked nor answered
where mist was a friend
you need not speak to,
or of, when it was gone.
For good. Or worse.
When it returns again
in dreams that float
as hammocks swing
empty between pines.
No thought of poems
or faces of friends or
damned questions
asking themselves why
those pines should not be.
They did not belong
as he did not either
and never would again.
Those pines grew roots
into questions for years
after bombs stopped falling.
Except in the Poconos
where he was made aware
that dreams can be dreamt
without sleeping and pines
rise from mist on
open or closed. Nothing
is ever really forgotten.
No one ever really dies
if there are roots
to pull them up
into branches of remembrance
swinging as hammocks swung.
A faceless veteran told him this.
Those pines were graves,
you strung his hammock from.
No one shot at you
for you slept above bones
and poems of holy men.
As you will sleep
when your future meets past
and that war is finally done.
You will sleep as poems sleep
beneath blue spruce with roots
that belong and you will not
dream of wrongs, hammocks
or pines on faces of friends
you never really forgot.
You slept well then,
in his hammock over bones
of Buddhist monks and poems
no one ever wrote. You will
have no need of questions
of what was right or why
but you will,
finally,
understand.
DEWEY173
A/4th/173rd
68/69
