Smeared

Smeared

My father said he killed a man

With fire, steel, and iron

Out beyond the last cairn stones

That speckle-paint our island.

 

My brush held steady in my hand;

My landscape-painting shook

When with his weight

And lack of grace

He settled with a book.

 

Silence, then.

I paint. He reads.

My painting isn’t right.

Something sickly in the air

is blocking the good-light.

 

I didn’t think to ask him, then,

What it means to erase;

To paint in red and leave one dead--

The burdens that would make.

 

My father said he'd killed a friend

Who’d never done him wrong.

“It was out beyond the mountain

In the swell of a sad song.”

 

My landscape painting (now completed)

altered with his words:

The mountain hues were graveyard bones

That shifted in the dirt.

 

My father said he’d killed a man,

And killed a dozen more.

My father was an honest man.

An honest man at war.

---

1

2