Wounded Soldiers
It was always a dwarf pine they asked for, Before cigarettes. Was it themselves they saw— crippled and bound?
Or their squat country, twisted and pruned, Contained in a tipsy saucer? Were these , From the woods of home, the great trees Humbling themselves to enter a hospital ward?
Was it merely the dreary lesson of attrition and discipline, the silent war To reafforest their slithering island-- a tight and tricky ambition To become gigantically perfect once rnore, and cast aside the crutches of a crippled power?
They never sought such answers.
The stunted pine was neither art nor thought, But part of them that no physician Could prescribe, no surgeon ever amputate, Whatever else might go.
May no dwarfish politician Lift his monstrous leg against it now!
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