Bringing Bodies like Kindling Wood

There are times, when the sky opens up and cries.
The sky cried all the time, it seemed, in Vietnam.
I tried pulling bodies out of the line of fire,
out of mud, out of endless caustic rainfall.
I’d find parts of a human and bring wounded back.
Often, death could not wait, and I’d arrive too late.
Rain was juxtaposed at intersection of life and death.
Rain did not care about longitude or latitude of pain.

In Vietnam, it rained bullets in Agent Orange skies.
On my last mission, the day before going home,
carrying a man, I hit a trip-wire, and I lifted into the sky.
Doctors took skin grafts from my arms to my burnt feet,
without medication, rain confessed to my wounds.
I learned what it is like to be carried out alive.

* 

On the Battlefield

During the shelling,
bullets sing as they pass by me.
I’m kneeling over a body
opening my field medic kit.
He is not going to make it.
He sees my concern, my averting eyes.
He asks the million-dollar question:
Where is God in all this?

I can’t save him.
I can barely save myself.
At this moment, religion abandons us.
What are we supposed to believe in?
During this moment of fear, sweat, and death,
I find no easy answer.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages. He has over 20 full-length poetry collections including “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Still Point Press, 2024); “Not All Beautiful Things Need to Fly” (Silver Bow Publishing, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Collected Works” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and forthcoming, “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (March Street Press, 2025).