My contribution to the invitation by our Andre Bendavi ben YEHU for the National Poetry Month.
You all know the Colonel, he will talk to you like a father that can't go away yet, because he is bound here by the plight of his children.
The Southern Belle, from Santee River, is the Mother which also has something to say to you about their children...

I am a lost soldier in the twilights of times past,
when the Liberty Bell got a bullet in that war
I wish I was there but in my destiny was written
that I should be a soldier when brothers fought.

I couldn’t die, and if I did…why I am still here?
still riding by Savannah a battle-seasoned horse,
wearing the gray Colonel uniform with braids,
and on my side the scabbard holding my sword.

Wandering for hundred and thirty seven years,
I haven’t see no peace for the sons of my sons,
generations of offering mothers with broken hearts
starting with the bombastically War to end all Wars.

In Normandy’s Omaha beach a wave of my boys
only twenty-six years after from the first one it took,
to make more widows and desperate waiting mothers
in what they proudly called the Second World War.

Bleeding in Korea for some obscure reasons were
the children of my children’s children there lost,
among the promised youth, the tomorrow seeds
to “give” us a more free and perhaps a better world.

Jungles of Vietnam, went looking for grandchildren
that were sent there because the “falling” dominoes,
over fifty-six thousand of hearts so full of illusions
one by one for ever stopping in that forsaken land I saw.

A soldier that is lost in conflicts of times past twilights,
ask one old Colonel wearing gray embroidered with gold,
why the children of my children’s children had no peace,
when the fields should be full of wheat and of death not.

I wish to go back to the magnolia trees alleys of yesterday,
where a southern belle by the Santee river gave me love
to last forever, but now, utterly alone, I am wandering
on a land that was, of gentlemen with honor on their words.

Twilights of times past, please don’t send
more of my children to fight your wars.