In my great-uncle Charlie’s portrait,
he wears his doughboy uniform,
and I see the pride he felt then.
He couldn’t yet know
that the muddy trenches of France,
stained with the blood of infantrymen,
would be so unlike his peaceful valley
in East Tennessee;
and he couldn’t foretell
that the scars he would carry inside
from that distant place
would haunt him till the day he died.
In the portrait of my great-uncle Charlie,
made before he went to war,
his face is eager and his mind unmarred,
his heart set on being part of something grand
and darker than he could imagine.
