@SpoOny Said
Yeah, and once that's happened a few times, you learn to distance yourself from others, cause you know you're just gonna have to leave them sooner or later anyway, so why bother getting to know them
I wrote this a little while back about a picture I found in my mom's photo album. It was taken when my mother, sister, and I were living in a little mountain town in Pennsylvania where mom grew up while my father was stationed in Okinawa for a year. He came back for Christmas and was getting ready to march in the town Christmas parade with my uncle who was also a Marine. We were standing on the town's main street together and he was in his dress blues.
Your post reminded me of the parenthetical toward the end of the poem.
Christmas 1978
A snapshot of uniformed Marine
he stands
strong
unapproachable
stoic.
There's a young boy in the photo
his son,
who was me.
He looks at his father,
an attempt to approximate the Marine's face
plays itself on the young boy's mouth
and unsullied eyes.
It cannot be complete though
Not yet--
for his eyes have not seen the same things
they do not know the hardship of manhood
of fatherhood
of awkward love
or of the loss of loved ones.
They have not learned to stop crying
at greivances forgone.
There's a road ahead of the boy
uprooting often
moving on,
friendless in the nomadic opera of his childhood
(there was always much to be done,
so none of us ever learned to say goodbye)
He will learn the look on his father's face though.
He will earn it well.