Elegy for a Dead Soldier

My father died at the end of May this year...just a couple of months past my own heart attack. It was surprise and a shock, of course; you can never be ready for the death of a parent. Dad was a young man during the Great Depression, and learned the craft of carpentry serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, later island hopping throughout the Pacific with the Seabees (somewhere we still have the set of dominoes he meticulously carved from native mahogany).

Image via Wikipedia

He was a classic representative of the "greatest generation," surviving the Depression, World War II, and supporting a family as a skilled tradesman - a member of the last generation that would extend respect to a man that worked with his hands.

Everything I learned about being a good man, I learned from him.

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Elegy For a Dead Soldier

Karl Shapiro, 1944



A white sheet on the tailgate of a truck
Becomes an altar, two small candlesticks
Sputter at each side of the crucifix
Laid round with flowers brighter than the blood,
Red as the red of our apocalypse,
Hibiscus that a marching man will pluck
To stick into his rifle or his hat,
And great blue morning-glories pale as lips
That shall no longer taste or kiss or swear.
The wind begins a low magnificat,
The chaplain chats, the palm trees swirl their hair,
The columns come together through the mud...

...The time to mourn is short that best becomes
The military dead. We lift and fold the flag,
Lay bare the coffin with its written tag,
And march away. Behind, four others wait
To lift the box, the heaviest of loads.
The anesthetic afternoon benumbs,
Sickens our senses, forces back our talk.
We know that others on tomorrow's roads
Will fall, ourselves perhaps, the man beside,
Over the world the threatened, all who walk:
And could we mark the grave of him who died
We would write this beneath his name and date:

EPITAPH
Underneath this wooden cross there lies
A Christian killed in battle. You who read,
Remember that this stranger died in pain;
And passing here, if you can lift your eyes
Upon a peace kept by a human creed,
Know that one soldier has not died in vain.