Heilige Nacht
.
Some are living on against their will.
Some are afflicted with anger
As if they had been born to be irate
To condemn and to find fault
To whittle others down to nothing
Like soap.
,
Then, because I grieve
For the fallen
And I am burdened with sin
Make of me a soap seal
That flays herself with her fins.
That is what I am
Made of boiled ash,
Whose ash I know not—
,
A tattered and torn flag
On the memorial day for fallen
sons, the soft bodies crushed by war
Shipped home in the flag-draped coffins
And the mule deer, black blood
From their mouths, faltering in the trees
On the foolish green grass of Normandy
,
Where the headstones chatter on to themselves
The bones play knock knock
The tide sucks at the shore
And pulls back and back
The sea stars divide and multiply
.
They came in their spangled pride
and walked in to the shore
And fell to their knees, their chests
Bursting open with red wet valor.
They lay in the bruised and mothering sea
,
They were patched up, their arms
At their sides their mouths sewn
Shut, coins on their eyes
Our dead, our brave. We hid them away
We said their stories were follies
We danced in the moonlight
We plotted the next war and the next
.
We trained our children to be turret gunners
We said there were MIGs with Japs in them
We slept with the butterflies and got them
With child
And the butterflies lingered, calling to us
Stumbling in the foam with bound feet
,
And then we bombed the butterflies
And their children
That bore our blood—
We want to be forgiven;
We want to believe
But at dusk, at everyman’s Ramadan
.
We slaughter the lamb of history
And bleed the lamb’s blood into a chalice
And we call this God
And we say that God loves our wars
,
In the night our children
Weep over their imperfections
With the powers and foresight of the young
They see we are doomed
Our species gone down into ruin
The sun runs away with the moon
The clouds fall into the sea
.
We soldier on
Our sins pressing us beneath the waves
Yet we say that no one among us
Has unreasonably exulted, sung forth the battle hymn
with star spangled gusto
Or drowned in a beautiful blue lie.
,
