Hunting for Antiques


I need parts for an old lamp
and another table.  I love old tables,
the patina of worn wood, many layers of polish
showing the use and care of families
for generations: You can feel the years,
the lives, just running your hand
over the wood.  But in a corner,
in an old shop display case,
I see medals, military decorations,
gathering dust, ribbons wrinkled, faded,
colors bleeding into one another
and the metal tarnished with years of neglect.
And I wonder how a family can give these up
knowing the soldier himself probably said,
as we all did, a medal and a dollar
will get you a cup of coffee;
and so they are of no value; not as heirlooms,
as antiques, the measure of a man’s life
lost in the war or not, it doesn’t matter.
But they are given, as the Army says, because
men need to be rewarded for their sacrifice,
and men wouldn’t do what they do in war
without them:  Yet I remember one soldier who saved
another wounded in the chest, by dragging
him back under heavy fire, getting wounded himself
and dying later from those wounds.  And the medal
went home to his wife to be placed in a drawer
and after awhile never looked at again— 
eventually to be found here, or someplace like here,
to be bought for a dollar
and a story we have to make up
to go with each one.