He came home with powder still in his pores,
the scent of cordite sunk deep in his marrow.
Eyes scorched hollow by muzzle-flash nights,
where blood ran quicker than thought
and names were lost before they were spoken.
His sleep is a thicket of cries cut short,
a language of bone and grit,
spoken once and never forgotten.
Now the world wants softness.
The hiss of a kettle.
A touch at the wrist.
But his hands remember
how to strip a rifle blindfolded,
how to tighten the tourniquet
before the pleading stopped.
In pews they kneel around him,
but he does not kneel.
He cannot.
His knees are foreign soil.
The Body and Blood taste wrong now,
thin wine, dry wafer,
when he has drunk real death
and chewed down screams.
They ask him to cry,
to feel again.
He smiles, crooked, worn,
because they do not know
what it is to bury feeling
beside a roadside bomb,
to plant your soul
in someone else’s ruined chest
and leave it there, pulsing.
He is not numb.
He is flayed.
And peace, when it comes,
if it comes,
will be like rain on scorched clay,
slow to sink,
quick to vanish.
And still he walks beside us,
a revenant in civvies,
unhailed,
unhealed,
awake. —Donavon L Riley