Kabul Sunset Version II

by Bill Nevins

Kabul Sunset Version II
Kabul Sunset — “Mourn Your Dead Now,
Land of the Free”

(As proud-robed mujahideen
Give wary thanks in bearded faces
To Allah in the ruins
Of Forward Operating Bases
Daubed in sad skull-graffiti boasts
Of long-departed Yanks
In shadows of rusting Russian tanks.)

I have heard or read wise poignant words.
They’ve sewn together my shifting drifting worlds.
Kipling, Shakespeare, John Prine, James Wright,
Lennon, Dylan, whatever gets me through the night

Larry Kirwan’s “Fallujah” song or Patrick Sky,

Diving into the wreck of the Iliad, the Tain,

With sweet Ocean Vuong or some haughty Irish bard

Hoping not to shatter,
I read old battle-poems for wary solace:
My own true minstrel-boy gone to war for so long.

Star-flecked American war-guidons above each letterhead:
“Rest assured, Sir, you are in our thoughts.”

I watched the Albuquerque sun rise

For him, as I feared he had no eyes.

That awful morning long ago.

I was a foolish dad, for he saw, I know.

Went mad a month then as I first wrote frantic lines —

“Dover Base” and other cries,
Bitter sighs.  I knew he was dead.
We’ve gone years now to these Coronavirus times —
“changed utterly” as old Yeats said.

Do old poets ever heal, as nations move on?
In Marigold-Sunset blaze of Sunday of the Beloved Dead.

When all holy red sun banners had finally set,
and the dark came to wrap our mortal souls,
Spanish prayers were said
and yes at peace we are, he and I
these many years of peace dropping slow
these years of a war that should have ended long ago