Two Poems

Dixon Hearne

She rises before rays of hope
quit her kitchen window,
house yawning to chicory brew.
She shuffles mechanically
in her sensible shoes
misshapen by misshapen feet—
feet that worked the hard, southern fields,
tended to five children:
one taken early by sniper fire,
another claimed by a reckless car
on the eve of his deployment
to the merciless fields of Europe.
The losses settled in her face and eyes,
where they remain until the end,
like so many other faces and eyes that bear
the outward signs of troubled hearts.
Who counts the domestic casualties of men’s wars?