New Poetry: “What Great Grief Has Made the Civilian Mute” by Jennifer Murphy
To watch soldiers load into planes on television
To ignore veterans who manage to make it home
To cry out when an airman murders four of your friends
To never question the valiance of combatants
To have visions of your father stabbing you to death
To lose your sight in vodka and cigarettes
To flee the western night for that big bright eastern city
To discover there is no such thing as relief in escape
To forget the names of the slain from your hazy youth
To remember in excruciating detail the site of their wounds
To learn there is nothing you can do to raise the dead
To spend your life writing the killed into existence
To read the greatest fear for men is being embarrassed
To understand that for women it’s being murdered
To be the only female in the room of camouflaged men
To befriend the lonely fighter in the city of civilians
To love a Marine who became a decorated firefighter
To lose him in the North Tower that blue September
To watch soldiers load into planes on television
To embrace veterans who manage to make it home
for Deborah, Amy, Melissa, and Heather Anderson
and Captain Patrick “Paddy” Brown