Some Veterans Days I look at
old pictures of my father, cupping 
sepia or Kodak black-and-white 
to my hands’ heart and fate lines
broken before I was even born 
to a Daddy wounded in the 
“Good War,” that handsome 
fresh meat in Marine uniform 
who fought on Vella Lavella,
months later was shot on Guam.

Other Veterans Days I gaze
at nothing, if lucky 
in a place where I can’t hear
a parade or feel my heart shake 
from military drums and trumpets,
or have taps tear into my ears,
hurting more than politicians’
speeches like islands of clichés.
The nothing days hurl me 
back to the nights before 

pictures, to the little girl
lying still as a corpse in bed,
her father crying out 
from nightmares on the other
side of the wall he painted
pink as the lip of that big
conch shell he found
on some beach, a soft color
for me he dreamed would have
freedom forever, never war.

In the few photographs 
from my father’s young years,
there exist no pictures of 3 a.m. 
screams or the fragments
my mother spoke, “Malaria,
pleurisy, night sweats, safe 
now, get you cooled down,”
his horrors and her attempts 
at healing until their voices ebbed
and I could lift my head in hope

that my Daddy would stay alive.
None of the Kodak images show
twin round scars on his chest
and back, white as binary stars
from where the Japanese sniper’s
bullet hit him sprinting through
surf onto Guam’s coral beach,
impossible to dig foxholes in.
The pictures were as quiet 
as he was about the battles,

never one to brag about fighting,
a man who told me just once,
“I was stupid about war when I
joined the Marines, so young
my immigrant parents had to 
sign for me eager to keep 
their new country free.”
No 1940s snapshots show
Marines jammed together,
sweating in a boat nearing Guam,

“We didn’t speak, we all knew 
most of us would be wounded 
or dead before the day ended.”
Veterans Day again approaches,
trees shed leaves three weeks past 
October first, date my father 
was hit by a heart attack at fifty one.
“The family doctor said the wound
would shorten his life by twenty years,”
my mother confided.  I kissed his  

forehead where he lay in a coffin, 
still as I once lay, embalmed skin 
hard as coral.  I was twenty four.  
A boy played taps, a second echoed,
when our Marine was lowered into 
a hole in a mountain graveyard.
My three brothers, sister, Mom and I 
cried while trying to bury our faces.
On Veterans Day I might look at photos 
of him before he decided to be brave.​