Of Red and White and Blue

In three tips
and thirteen folds
they gave her the weight
of grief
and the colors of war.

Lightly, the way one holds
a newborn,
they carried to her
and placed in her hands
the appreciation
of a grateful nation
and an empty seat
at the kitchen table
and dry and distant smiles
in hanging photos
and a cold spot on the bed
and a hate of a war and an unquenchable longing,
phantoms of waiting mixed with forgetfulness.

There in her lap
sat the source
of a stir of apparitions,
images
she had never seen
would never see
of his last expressions
the man who took him
the ones beside him
the country she gave him to
the bullet, the gun, the ground
he stood on, the ground he laid on,
the hands that touched him,
that pain that touched him,
the pain that touched her
and touched her
and touched her.