Unfinished Business

It's as though you died mid-sentence
index finger pointing aloft
forever making your point.
Magnified by memory, your mouth remains ajar
with unspoken words. This death scene
becomes the set frozen on my psyche's stage.

Hue,
Da Nang,
The Mekong Delta,
and their bloodied jungles
became our voiceless battleground.
Though our words congealed,
it was Hanoi vs. Saigon
spilling their Agent Orange
upon my hearth.

Publicly
protesting and marching,
I carried banners and flags
on village greens
and circled caskets
on church lawns.

Privately
you were humiliated.
My actions had become your anguish.
Like the mother bear, I grew fierce
and proclaimed my four sons must not learn to kill
or be killed in an unwinnable war!
You replied
your four grandsons should be honored
to save the world for freedom!
Dumbstruck, we retreated again.

Then the unspeakable...
your voice was silenced...
the final salvo to dialogue.

When they argued about the shape of the table
for the Paris Peace talks,
I felt we were there.
When I visit America's wailing wall
and thank God that my sons' names aren't chiseled
in its blackness,
I grieve,
because our relationship should be.

I pray you are at peace,
for I am still a POW.