To Honor Eddie Klump

A small, bent man accompanied
my elderly father to our Easter dinner.
Shy, ashen-faced, crook-legged,
he was beyond our attempts
to imagine him a soldier
in the khaki of WWII with
gun clutched to shoulder,
other arm swinging free.
He rushed an enemy turret?
No, surely not this pale man in paler suit.
Fifty years ago time in a German
prison camp took the color
from his life and earned him
a purple heart for bravery and pain.
Here, some Sunday School grace:
Mother gone, my father
adopted this stray and ancient waif,
and bequeathed him to my husband's care
and a home in the V.A. hospital.

We honor those who "gave their all,"
but what about those
whose all was taken?  All, that is, but a loose
thread of future unwinding into days
of borrowed families; Sunday services;
playing cards with other vets; emptying mind
into the vacuum of t.v. and
a drink with a consoling woman.
No wife to share his painful bed.
No children to laugh him into
the day after tomorrow.

Rest now, Soldier.
In the 60 years since that prison
door opened for you,
you have lived only for the glory of
this moment--
to lay beside your brothers
in Arlington's rows of white.