Poem – “For Early Graves” – Modern Romanticism – 2/27/2022

To the eyes, to the moonlit
part of earthen eyelids
that winter shut, that night had hid
beneath where bones are
forming trails in the scattered dirt.
Life above, pages below
written in the earliest hour,
laid in the latest light.

A soldier's cross, a mother's woe,
while faces, the same in glance
to what left an entrance
from arms to the limited land.
Love keeps carving hearts
inside the lightless land.
Graves dug for what Heaven knows
roams among tears for many years.

Next page to a later life,
torn from the book of promise
to be more than the garden's end.
Life, on a rope.
Bullets, on a slope - 

raining upon the graves
for secrets never saved.
An eye misses a shell
upon the war-torn shoreline, - 

a misfire for a place in Hell,
standing frozen, all this time.
We walk over to embrace
our enemies on their weaker side.
More comfort in the hold,
in blood or arms that fold.