C.M

 ELASTIC HEARTS

when the recovery team looks for us, 

 after all of this blows over     

 the best description they’ll possibly give 

 is not 

the serial number on our metal tag 

 the holiness in 

    our blood type or

     the lapelled uniform

      squared across our body

 they will not find us

 if they search for

a platoon     

calling us a platoon

would be like calling 

the flower

                  a field 

the bramble

               a forest

 perhaps their spotlight will catch

                  a glint of preservation

some semblance of

our being;

footsteps in muddied earth

        the blackened ghost of

                         a kindled fire

threadbare stockings

dangling straps                                                                                                                                          

tattered atonement in   

 goldenrod light

as they collect relics of us

from the frozen fallow floors

it will be the last overturned bush 

that their faces grow long,

grow narrow

grow aghast

grow human.

because when we fell 

from that plane  

we lost someone

will they understand his ending?

          will their bodies steep 

                         into 

                                tempest-

mother goose 

 returning to her nest

                eggs cracked

 yolk in the 

 basin

will their sensors detect

 the youth that was in him

the elastic heart 

carried from

boyhood?

 that he was most 

comfortable with a loosened collar, pushed-up sleeves

a guitar lazily 

strummed on his knees?

will they know 

 his fingertips were 

 calloused from the strings

or that it was his handmade mary

orphaned beneath

the roots of

the hickory tree?                                                                                

‘so quickly we thank God

       yet soon after curse the dying warmth,’

he told us this decisively-

why he forged her

of pewter and gunsmoke.

A brief insight for this poem:

As I have spent more time investigating WWII and trying to understand my grandfather’s own experience, this poem seemed to fall out of me. It was inspired by a story my grandfather shared about the day his plane was struck down. When they landed in Germany, they had lost one soldier.

The more I thought about that story, the more I found myself thinking about the way we speak about soldiers. We typically remember them as soldiers first- by their uniforms, their ranks, their names on memorial, and they are constantly portrayed as headstrong heroes and heroines in books and Hollywood films. But they were also just young people. The men in my grandfather’s squadron were roughly eighteen to twenty-two years old. They were kids, really. Yet they carried intense weight on their shoulders, during a time when most of us are only beginning to understand who we are.

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