Homecoming

John Leax

In the beginning there was war,
and my father, hardly more than a boy,
was called. Because he had no church
to witness to the peaceful heart
that spoke a living word within
his chest, he went, and he became
a silent man. In the chasm
of his obedience I fell,
plunged with my first steps
into the wash of blood-a slash
of milky glass split my face from nose
to cheek and left me just one eye to watch
for his return. My mother wept,
I'm sure. No one told my father.
He soldiered on in ignorance of the night
already settling on his day.

His oldest brother fell at Normandy,
and though he rose, he rose to thump
impatiently on one good leg,
on one good stump. My father had no hour
to take such news to heart. Under orders,
he drove forward, sometimes horsing an ammo
truck, sometimes a general's jeep.
He posed for photographs and sent them
like postcards to his wife and mother, joked,
"Having a wonderful time."

Then one April Sabbath in 1945,
his Easter prayers still moist upon his lips,
he drove into a tomb empty of all purpose:
thirty-thousand creeping skeletons,
inhuman, massed like insects behind a fence,
nine-thousand heaped bodies, bone rubble,
stacked, meticulously accounted for
in the dark books of Dachau order,
disordered every word he knew. No joke
could force the truth aside. No prayer
he'd learned in the bright bedtimes
of his farmboy youth could halt the stone
rolling inexorably between the close
enclosure of his mind and the wide
goodness of the life he knew before the word
descended void in vengeance, blood, and bone.

Thirty years from that moment, his heart gave
up the burden of his eyes. He shrugged,
gave a muffled cry, and died. It was night.
My mother's call reached me in morning.

His body lay gravely silent when I stood
to pray beside it. What question I asked,
what answer I sought, I cannot even
now find voice to say. I think, should
God come down to answer for this world,
he too might break his silence with a shrug,
give up, and die, helpless before the blank
enormity he'd meet in flesh.
I wonder if I'd know him in his life
or in his death. The day I met my father
I was three. My aunt held me above the swirl
of eager wives jamming the station hall.
Each time a man, young, joyful, in uniform
descended from a bus, I cried,
"Is that him? Is that him?"
I can't remember when she said, "Yes,"
or if he took me in his arms
and touched his face to mine.

Visit John Leax as Image Artist of the Month for September 2004

Issue #35 • Summer 2002