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Survivors

Do they ever truly come home?

By Mack DevlinPublished 3 years ago 1 min read
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Their heavy boots leave dire marks

Upon the cracked, crumbling earth.

A field of sun hardened mud

Stretches endlessly before them.

The future, a distant unfathomable sea.

The present, a viscous pressing fog.

The past, a thick scar on the brain.

Their march has no rhythm,

No echoing cadence fills the silence.

A shell-shocked platoon wandering,

Stumbling toward the next field,

A pin in the map of progress.

A plain once again sewn with blood,

Stitched with the mangled dead,

A graveyard of forgotten dolls.

Innocence drowned in the shallows

Like disfigured Spartan children.

The native heads of the opposition,

Crying out for more bodies.

The foreign heads of the allies,

Forcing abbreviated assaults.

Every inch gained, taken back

By chattering war machines.

A hard concurrent upstream swim

Between Scylla and Charybdis.

And then on again, on again

To the next killing floor.

Survivors are the pitiable ones

For the dead never march again.

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About the Creator

Mack Devlin

Writer, educator, and follower of Christ. Passionate about social justice. Living with a disability has taught me that knowledge is strength.

We are curators of emotions, explorers of the human psyche, and custodians of the narrative.

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