"platters" poems - Hello Poetry

he had a third beer before the hot platters came he would have had another, had she not stared, like she going to ask every question he did not want to answer… how did it feel to slap his first wife? how did it feel to pull the trigger and mow men down like so many weeds? those were the questions in her eyes and had he ever told anyone, what happened that night when they came upon a village, where the young ones slept with the dead, their ancestors only a few feet away, watching, mute, beyond the paddies where they planted the rice, the narrow trails where they hunkered and spoke the ancient tongue, not adulterated by the romance of the French or the clumsy amalgam of shredded sounds from the new soldiers the giants who ignored them in the steaming light of day but came one night, bringing strange smells, oiled steel muzzles pointed at their faces, shoved into their empty ears grunting and groaning in an even more grotesque tongue leaving tears and trembling in their wake, the torn flesh, the wounded wombs, the silken vessels meant to be there for the milky planting of tomorrow’s seeds not the greedy groping of the interloper’s devilish deeds was she asking about that night, the sounds he recalled like puppies under heavy foot, or worse, like the madding moaning of his own sister when someone ripped her open not in the distant killing fields but in the back seat of her car not two miles from where they sat where he ordered more beer, and she asked those questions with her silence, with her eyes, the questions he would never answer not after all the beer, in all the free world, and he was pitifully glad they served no sushi, in Kiki’s, though the sharpened knives were there ready for his confessional and the raw slaughter of truth

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Jul 30, 2013

Jul 30, 2013 at 2:43 AM UTC

spysgrandson

sushi at Kiki’s

he had a third beer before the hot platters came he would have had another, had she not stared, like she going to ask every question he did not want to answer… how did it feel to slap his first wife? how did it feel to pull the trigger and mow men down like so many weeds? those were the questions in her eyes and had he ever told anyone, what happened that night when they came upon a village, where the young ones slept with the dead, their ancestors only a few feet away, watching, mute, beyond the paddies where they planted the rice, the narrow trails where they hunkered and spoke the ancient tongue, not adulterated by the romance of the French or the clumsy amalgam of shredded sounds from the new soldiers the giants who ignored them in the steaming light of day but came one night, bringing strange smells, oiled steel muzzles pointed at their faces, shoved into their empty ears grunting and groaning in an even more grotesque tongue leaving tears and trembling in their wake, the torn flesh, the wounded wombs, the silken vessels meant to be there for the milky planting of tomorrow’s seeds not the greedy groping of the interloper’s devilish deeds was she asking about that night, the sounds he recalled like puppies under heavy foot, or worse, like the madding moaning of his own sister when someone ripped her open not in the distant killing fields but in the back seat of her car not two miles from where they sat where he ordered more beer, and she asked those questions with her silence, with her eyes, the questions he would never answer not after all the beer, in all the free world, and he was pitifully glad they served no sushi, in Kiki’s, though the sharpened knives were there ready for his confessional and the raw slaughter of truth