American Military Cemetery, Cambridge

In the neat white stones,
On the buzz-cut grass,
Past the path and the rank of ponds
The American dead
Sit up straight and still
To listen to their flag.

Along the low memorial wall,
Above the soldiers and ships and planes,
Long sentences
drum with glory and war;
A beat that skips mere men
Past names
To numbers on a plaque:
One number lost,
The other found and buried here.

A Cambridge student reads the toll
Then turns to read the stones;
Not the epitaphs—the stones themselves;
The two letter dirge
Typed in curve after curve
Around the trembling flag:
Here lies a Christian soldier
Here lies a Christian soldier
Here lies
One of David’s sons.

Faith, like life, is terse
Among the military dead.

An old English couple
Meander through the graves.
Did he fight by these foreign men?
Does she remember their handsome grins?
The sexual charge
Of uniform and youth?
Was memory what brought them here?
And brought the others
Who watch or walk or
Stoop to read the stones?

Perhaps.
Or perhaps it was the tingle
Down their tranquil spines,
The blood that leaves their peaceful cheeks
For someone else’s glory.

The student thinks:
These U.S. graves all look the same,
In Washington, In Normandy or Cambridge.
As though the same clean shaven Joe
Lies under every cross,
While his buddy Saul,
A darker clone, lies under every star;
As though—when they died in pain,
Shot down in flames or
Bleeding on an army bed—
They never thought to curse
The uniform that killed them.

But the student
Didn't come here
To pity fallen men.
He came to worship glory,
And glory wears his uniform
Most proudly when he’s dead.