Both boys loved each other.
Both shared brotherhood.
Both lived in the wickerwork
of war.
Time was lightning and thunder
and nonsense.
The twenty-one year old,
furloughed from carnage,
stood by the hospital bed
of his nine year old brother.
That’s prose.
Explosions kill poetry,
kill children and bewildered men.
The young boy would survive
his surgery.
The older brother emptied his
pocket of coins.
Everything he had left of life,
and love.
And Jack, the older returned
to the storm,
the little boy to his toys
and pieces of childhood
that still remained.
Time moved its currents
past other shores.
Jack was butchered with his
comrades in the dark gloom
of winter.
Charles went on to another place,
work, family.
But in odd places,
at holidays, midnight,
in the courtroom where he worked
they returned to each other, time on time.
For an instant,
an imaginal place between them.
The coins were returned
to Jack’s resting site in Europe.
A white cross at the head
of the war’s lost destinies.
The closest stars in heaven.