A Forward Position
As
far as the village the road was clear.
We
passed by a group of refugees, huddled
in
a ditch, near the body of a man stopped by sniper fire, his hair
still
soupy with blood.
They
said the sniper had gone now, and one of them asked
did
we know how far the fighting was; another asked
the
time.
A
man whose children were dead, said
this
country’s a puppet with cut strings, and pointed
to
a clearing, to a pitch of upturned clay.
He
said, the rest of us are mostly there.
On
the façade of the old hotel, across
the
signs for Visa and Mastercard, an ellipsis of shell pocks
trailed
towards the cellar,
where
we found the others, stacked neatly
to
the ceiling.
We
radioed back.
In
the afternoon,
a
woman appeared from where a house
used
to be, in her shawl
grenade-green,
overripe fruit. We offered her a smoke,
but
she said, I want to see a doctor.
The
day was an oven, but orders were orders,
and
we moved on.
Later,
clearing a tripwire
from
a blind-spot hedge, somebody thought maybe
we
should have got the kid off her.
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