A.Z. Foreman

Arma Virumque

My bones were a Yamnayan's prize in battle.

He wore my metatarsals round his neck.

A Saxon gored my eyes and took my cattle.

My heart was chopped out of a Tlaxcaltec.

Bartatua glugged my blood out of a bowl.

Others just took my corpse and cooked it whole.

           I was a helot at Thermopylae.

I was a bowman on Megiddo's wall.

I was a wichasha at Wounded Knee.

I died at the Alamo and Azovstal.

I fell with Masada and Tenochtitlan.

My vomit stains the beard of Genghis Khan.

           I fell in war's incessant muzacked shriek

six and six hundred and six thousand years

ago, in desert, jungle, trench and creek,

to phosgene gas and slingrock, gagged on spears

of steppeland horsemen hunting deathless fame

and lost my molecules to drone-shot flame.

           Katana, crossbow, mace and M16

pestled a billion bodies that I wore.

My widowed wives were raped in Busanjin.

My captains shot me on Corregidor.

This species' kleat has kicked into my bone

a hideous virtue. Heroes can't atone.

           Armadas flagged with destiny have beached

my death in Carthage and the Yucatán

where they watched sunset glorious, on bleached

bones, as a song of weapons and a man

while I looked upon sworded history

through rotting eyes of hominid debris.

           I watched tribes whirled to nations into states,

bartering blood for flags that gently lied,

saw death industrialize itself with hates

that clanked efficiently to genocide.

From Wormhout to the shores of Tripoli,

morale is stronger than morality.

           My mothers' wombing anguish cannot chill

the burning gloat of peace. Man's habit is

to launch the Bandeirantes through Brazil

and citify my beetled carcasses.

Do not insult me with apology.

I only tell you to remember me.

           I am the vanquished soldier. I recall

how bills of human rights are paid in wrongs.

I am the carvings on the stomach wall

of sane men sick at patriotic songs.

My unlaid ghost will devil till the sun

falls on the final war and I have won.

A.Z. Foreman is a linguist, poet, short story author and/or translator currently pursuing a doctorate at the Ohio State University. His work has been featured in the Threepenny Review, ANMLY, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere but not yet The Starfleet Academy Quarterly. He wants to pet your dog.