No Place to Hide

Incoming rockets! Oh my God, it’s started again,

I look to the sky and cry, what is the unpardonable sin?

Why have you forsaken me then slips from my tongue,

Is there any hope this un-rightable wrong will ever be undone?

I thought I was strong enough when I volunteered for service,

Believing in my heart I could not be consumed by this raging furnace.

You would think I could find refuge as I lie low in this hole,

It is moments like these I wish I could be reborn as a mole.

For at least then there would shelter from the ferocious assault,

Knowing all too well these desperate thoughts are for naught.

For I sense that nothing can protect me for this force will not relent,

Sometimes I believe in my heart this firestorm is from hell sent.

I fight with all the courage and the resolve I can muster,

But my flanks are vulnerable from the attacks that come in clusters.

Perhaps I saw myself as a liberator when I came to this foreign land,

Experience should have told me a wounded animal forsakes an outstretched hand.

Other good intentioned soldiers have ventured here before my arrival,

Perhaps they too thought they could facilitate this country’s revival.

Like those before me who packed their tents and left with head in hand,

I fear my successes are fleeting, like so many grains of desert sand.

Sunken Treasures

I wonder where your heart is,

Even you probably do not know.

Perhaps it has journeyed so many times,

It cannot find its way back home.

You cherish ephemeral encounters,

They seem so mysterious and mystical to you.

Perhaps it’s the fleetingness of the moment,

That makes them an enigma in your mind.

Intertwined within your memory,

Serving as an everlasting shrine.

Time and time again you approach the altar,

To pay homage to phantom dreams.

For these are sunken treasures,

Buried among the wreckage of the past.

They sit on the floor of your ocean,

Waiting patiently to be reclaimed.

Though obscured by murky waters,

They were surely cast from precious metal,

Tarnished and corroded, buried deep within this sea,

It matters not, to your eyes they seem pristine.

Grandfather's Clock

I know that sound, for I’ve heard it countless times before.

I cannot help but feel Death’s hand knocking on my door.

It crept into my consciousness at such a tender age,

taken to the chambers of an old man dressed in a white gown.

He stood not on his feet, for he was much too feeble to walk.

The squeaking of the rocker where his frail body melted into the wood –

was just accompaniment to the funeral dirge that pounded into my

unwilling ears.

Why had they brought me here? To embrace their devotion to death?

These morose creatures, my parents, were a different sort –

Pilgrimages to death beds and cemeteries

gave them a sense of morbid pleasure and purpose.

Here, though strange, it seemed that no words were spoken.

Just the tick, tick of the old mantel clock.

Time seemed suspended as these ghosts breathed, but yet were not alive.

Shadows of darkness flooded their blank eyes.

This deafening sound a premonition that signaled the final chapter

of the old gent’s book.

Etched itself into the stone slab of my skull.

Although his image has become but a lifeless blur, the sound of

grandfather’s clock is blazoned in my brain.

And whenever I have the misfortune of hearing that dismal refrain,

I feel my life from me slowly start to drain.

For me I sense it is a mournful call,

A melancholy sound to be heard no more.

Note from Author: “ I can barely tolerate being in a room with the sound of any

pendulum clock; this memory is so vivid.”

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