THE VETERAN by J. Michael
August 23, 2007 Poetry Tags: J Michael, military, poem
Against a barricade of damp sand
in sacks, we’ve been waiting,
ears tuned to the shuffle of soles.
Sweat trails down the stock of my gun.
Firing has gone on for seconds, or hours,
and beneath the edge of cordite and smoke
I can smell the rot of their bodies
as familiar as the smell of my own skin.
JJ turns to me, his face slick with soot
and through it he’s grinning, damn him, grinning,
like he’s the hero of some old war flick,
and I know right then
that this isn’t my story.
I’m not the one who’ll strap himself
to the bomb and fly off into decimation
like some flaming falcon; I’m not the one
who’ll feel his gun melting in his fist,
who’ll go out laughing, blood and sun
flickering on his white teeth.
That’s not me.
Tomorrow,
or the next day,
or the next, they’ll climb through the piles
that began as a barricade, the bodies
tumbled in pieces on either side; our guys
and the others a bit farther gone.
Maybe someone will recognize me.
I look over the sandbags into my own grave.
There’s dirt under my nails. I smell the rot.
Flies jump like beads from a broken chain,
and I know, looking out, that we’re all the same.
We stand on the end of a quivering bridge.
They are the ones who’ve already crossed over.
i think that you are a very entertaining poet and you draw images very well.
one point that i would bring up is the ineffectiveness of bombs on zombies.
explosives generate a pressure wave and heat in addition to the initial shock and bits of shrapnel/debris.
each of these things are less-than-effective on zach. unless this is nuclear.
not a big point but i avoided it in a few stories of mine.
Comment by Andrew Burke on August 29, 2007 @ 11:53 pm
I think if you blow a body apart and/or shred it with schrapnel, it would then be easier to put a bullet into the skull. Anything to disable and slow down an advance. Napalm would also work. Burn everything to ash.
Comment by David on November 15, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
What if this was early in the war — wasn’t there a “Battle of Brooklyn” or something like that? The military tried standard tactics to contain Z at one/some of the bridges in New York City? Everybody (all the live bodies, at least) got mauled?
Comment by zombob on August 6, 2010 @ 11:22 am