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  MACHINE GUNNER

On decoration Day Grampa would put on his blue blazer with his metals,
And the cap that said “Canadian Corps” Pick up a bundle of Union Jacks and go to the cemetery. There he’d decorate the veterans graves soldiers of the great war When once I asked what the patch on the shoulder meant a light blue rectangle with a navy blue arrow, “I was a machine gunner.” Was all that he would say He never spoke of the mud and the trenches, or shooting the enemy down. He never spoke of the counter battery work, or the wounded or the dying, or the shelling, or the gas... And it was only years after he died that I learned the he carried a piece of shrapnel in his hip to his grave... He never spoke of war at all: But every May he’d decorate the veteran’s graves-- A soldier of the great war —+— Blast of light, flash of sound over fallen leaves remembrance —+— CREE WARRIOR He really had no damned business In France in 1916. He was a child of the forest free, a son of the great river. But the archdeacon said the king needed soldiers to fight for him. So with some friends and a little HBC English he set off to war. What his thoughts were he never said. What his entire service record was, none knows. But one morning this Cree hunter went over the top, over the top with 300 from his Battalion. Into the morning mists, into the shellfire, into the machine guns. At day’s end only he and the battalion commander were left standing. Warrior. I fear only this and some forgotten mention, in some dusty dispatch tells your story. Accept this poor poem as an eagle feather: honour from a graceful, and wondering heart. —+— fallen leaves written on stone: pro patria