Jennifer Pierson
from Dispatches from the (War) Hospital
Nightwatch One
But in their brilliance angels do not lift us above our ruinance.
you arrive in the night
your body laid down and wait
a hand or a shoulder braces it
grief moves through us
as
our bodies lift your stretcher oh
the body moves the heart the hands how
rough they love
(a careless angel hovers)
On the Way
no I
lost it
along the way with blood and a lung
no reach for air
can no more take all I need in nor
wait to see home again
ants scurry to repair my open bones
my wife’s
somewhere
they say you hear in a coma but
no words come in
my neck’s
broken
river flowing
blue lights
white
it’s not the flat black you think
Post Traumatic Stress
holding you
your lanky
body shaking
above the chair
we place you in
never have we seen
such shaking
offering you
now this garland
mass flow’ring
of forgetting
On the Bus
his head his
neck slashed
black: the cuts
elegiac a
scarf of loss
humanness seeps out
**
as he turns
his cheek to show
the impeded bullet
tears
pool
he moves his mouth to say hello
Third Week in Iraq
Remote though your death days after denies us breath
last week’s manifest
your name crossed off
too unstable:
bloodied lungs/shrapneled clavicle
we expected you
to fly to us
on the near-next arrival
instead
this morning papers
wave your name/face
body unmanifest
to us untouched
(Shane Mahaffee, died May 2006)
Nightflow
Seepage
another seepage of sorrow
from off the shoulders of
a mother
a brother
seated away from us
while
out in the open the
father rigid
listens
for the
breathing
of his son
(here come the angels asleep again lifting their burden)
2 AM
Need
Bring us alluvial
air to take in
clear us of dying
Bad memory walks
beside us
when we watch unbreathable
many and their arbitrary
wounded confused brethren
Oh wash us away our sins
Drone
the bone-saw with its necessary
teeth cutting flesh
flesh itself
flayed & falling off
the great gush of blood
splayed to the wall
the floor
sprayed with redred gauze
and here the seized-open-with-steel-claws
chest how righteous piteous
the heart and oh
infected the blemished
bones organs
(now nearing the sad mouth smell of loss)
Rushing/Balad Hospital/Arrival
Kick-up of sand/wind//
All is shadowed/then
the whick-whick of blades
as the helicopter lands
The medic rushes down/a bundle in his arms/rushes
to the medic/rushing/to take the bundle from his arms//
A foot
falls
off//
Blood and sorrow-pain/’s
carried into bright light //
Caesura
Sunday night
stretchers lined up in bright light
medics grow sleepy on them
a supervisor grimaces
then static becomes life
as two busloads of wounded pull up
How
How do you
look at a soldier
whose left
eye’s gone missing?
Jennifer Pierson is a lifelong pacifist. During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2004-2009, she was an AerVac volunteer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, greeting and caring for the incoming wounded and their families. She teaches poetry to retirees at American University in Washington, DC.