Today's poem is by Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas

Handful of Stallions at Twilight
        —For my father, Army Corporal, 7 Ordnance, Korea Golden Gate National Cemetery Plot: 2C 4599

Thoughts on what's left behind—

The memory of a houseful of mourners,
my aunt as she opened the old Frigidaire, saying,

Be strong for your mother—here
are your dinners for the next hundred days.

Our old dog, Blackjack, who slept
on your favorite pillow. The two years

he napped there as if you'd come home
then died in the loneliness of waiting.

I still remember the hollow of your eyes,
how shadows lurked through a haze of brown.

What voice must have said, there's no more
happiness, surrender, take this handful of pills.

They say heroes die in battle. Do some
face the enemy once they've come home?

And where are your medals, your ribbons
of honor for winning a war?

Here, this souvenir, this gathering
of stars, this American flag that covered

your casket while buglers played the day
you were buried to the sound of Taps.

I've saved your drawings, your pictures
of stallions, and notes that you scribbled,

your jumbling of thoughts. Did you write
the answers on the bark of a tree?

Will it one day rot, too weak to stand, fall
onto itself against the cold earth, its canopy

of leaves splayed over ground, your sadness
removed where a cluster of dandelions rise

wild and free? Who will know the sorrow
that came to you? Or was it joy—

a vision of angels carved from stone,
a golden gargoyle adorned at the gate?

When I found you, your cheek still kissable,
your skin the shade of water and sleep,

but too much time had passed to save you.
What life is so eclipsed by grief

death becomes a wanted thing? Was your last
goodnight an escape or apology?

Did you see an opening through a pinhole
in the sky, a path beyond darkness to moonlight?

Maybe you hoped someday I'd follow?
Was death so sweet a promise no daughter

could call you back? In my dreams, your horse
gallops on the meadow; the one you drew

from a black and white sketch. Sometimes
you're the rider; sometimes, there's just a horse.

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Copyright © 2024 Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas All rights reserved
from Handful of Stallions at Twilight
FinishingLine Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission