...when I think of the soldiers packing gear, their guns silent, tanks still, standing at the ready, eyes moist with liberation and grief, hands wrung their last, I think of them gleaming, striding away from the savagery, the dying, the defeated, the triumphant... colorless stench. When I see them marching out, freed of the difficult sand, I imagine that black soldiers are most anxious for home, valling for the stretch of time to witness their history, onlooker to human hope instead of war’s gangling limbs stacked like firewood on streets smothered in suffering. When I think of all of the soldiers coming home shipped in those god-awful frowning boxes, I try to imagine their loved and beautiful faces, but their smiles float away from who they were. What a sad and ghastly testament of their use. Dear Poet, May your use, your words paint upon this, grant us reprieve from an unfavorable history. Free our hearts and our minds of horrid combat, for war is the chain that has enslaved
(The Weaver's Song)