Today's poem.... it's timely

I am an advocate. DADT has never been right...maybe not even expedient. It is well past its time.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

When you sleep with a gun for the first time,
you interrogate its history like any lover’s,
imagining the deaths it holds in store. When you wed,
the world welcomes your union. Your children’s cries
drag the country in the wake of their echoes.

When the gun goes off, you hold water in your hands.
It moves gracefully through your fingers
as the body you’ve signed becomes a photograph.
Tell no one, another soldier murmurs
as he too takes aim. You breathe and march in unison,

feet stirring the same dry clay into the same dusty spirals.
The songs you exhale make of women the enemy,
their breasts landing sites, their legs
stone columns you must weave your way between.
Nights, you sleep below him on a metal cot

that rocks backwards like a train.
Promise, he says,
but he is talking in his sleep, his boyish voice contorted
by the remnants of compassion. The force of his solitude
reaches you through plaited wire. If you reached for him . . .
But your relation is merely political.

Don’t ask, croons your superior, and reason wavers,
hazy as a target in stark desert sun. But you have a question.
You want to ask what love is, if this is love:
what you feel when anonymous blood runs swiftly,
drizzled in fitful patterns like festive stars.

Carol Guess