Veterans of the Seventies
Marvin Bell

His army jacket bore the white rectangle  
of one who has torn off his name.  He sat mute  
at the round table where the trip-wire veterans  
ate breakfast.  They were foxhole buddies  
who went stateside without leaving the war.  
They had the look of men who held their breath  
and now their tongues.  What is to say
beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower  
and lower as the war went on, spines curving  
toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged  
with ammo belts enough to make fine lace  
of enemy flesh and blood.  Now these who survived,  
who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front,
lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires  
strung through tin cans.  Better an alarm  
than the constant nightmare of something moving  
on its belly to make your skin crawl  
with the sensory memory of foxhole living.