Today is Memorial Day and my thoughts, as always, turn to those who have given there lives for our country. I never knew my father who was killed in action in WWII when I was three months old. I wrote this poem when Easter Sunday and the anniversary of his death in 1944 fell on the same day. It’s not a new post, but it seems a fitting occasion to repost today for the dVerse Memorial Day prompt.
April Eighth
An article in the Smithsonian
alluded to the Holy
Shroud of Turin.
The image of Christ
seared radiologically
into a burial cloth.
A violent burst of energy.
A life-seed
in a closed space
blowing out boundaries.
Stories of an empty tomb.
Easter comes early
this year.
Daffodils explode in
the front garden,
sheltered by a warm wall.
April eighth,
nineteen forty-four.
A seed plummets to earth,
wrapped in a metal
death-womb.
Ejaculated from heaven,
it burrows into dank soil.
Buried.
Fragmented.
Combusted in another
surge of energy.
Months go by:
a year to the day.
Someone in the
War Department
types the letter on
a piece of onion-skin paper.
Words smudged by an
over-used ribbon tell
the woman to move on with her life.
The child will never call him
daddy.
Victoria C. Slotto, Author 