He had to be gone--

Silence, too much for anything else,

Anything golden or hope-filled or light.

Here, where dead leaves yet gathered on stone,

Under the splitting soles of war-worn shoes,

Only now would she awaken to the gutted facts,

Buried in rubble ruins all around her

.

In battle cries, a solider dies, another left all alone--

Be it mother, father, brother, wife, the rain falls all the same,

From this density of grey covering the length of the sky.

A stem’s stability, much like a false friend, so easily bends,

To the shifting scores of brotherhood’s newly chosen wars,

Where eyelids open as softest petals from blood-soaked poppies,

Too scared to wave in the wind or hide their dotted tears of black

Bombed again and again until it’s neither night nor day--

She awakens to the murmurs of what has finally given way,

Upon the spoken notice of his untimely death on some foreign field.