Mentioned in Dispatches
by John Barton
the three of us, it seems, are confederates, not in some army, though it feels as if
we have been summoned to an arbitrary watch, always on the lookout, yet spotting
no one in this undeclared war that has yet to be called off—not bachelors exactly
unconfirmed reports allege, but the kind of men who are seen in bars when little
else is on, marking, when others don’t, what passes for our birthdays in restaurants
the years marching by in ever more ragged formation before the reviewing stand
where we find ourselves decorated and slightly stiff, ill at ease and trying to hold
the regard of those aging young men whom we keep forgetting no longer look
much like they used to as they swagger past from the front with reports of action
no one directs at us while they play snooker in the Barracks, cues poised over the felt
rubbed raw and stained by the time they too have come to own the place, green
with beer and longing, unable to foresee engagements where all they have left
to exchange are memories, nothing fluid between them but wine—let’s raise a glass
to balls yet to be sunk, to the arms they collapse into when they are too darkly drunk
unlike the three of us who’ve traded the beauty of our weapons for sober white flags
hoping no one we surrender to, when it comes to prisoners and love, simply holds us
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