Keeper of Absence

A soldier haunted by war learns true peace exists only in death's silence.

He knew a paper peace before the gun –
A sketch of quiet, drawn in childhood sun:
The hush of fields at dusk, a mother's song,
A fragile truce where nothing could go wrong.
It was a word, a concept, thin and clean,
A distant shore, a cool, imagined scene.

Then came the forge. The thunder-cloven air,
The iron rain, the screaming everywhere.
He learned the grammar written in the grime:
The staccato burst, the slow, wet, sucking chime
Of boots in mud that stank of death and rust,
The shattered trust, the crumbling of dust
That once held homes. He held his comrade's gaze
As light bled out in those last, hollowed days.
He felt the tremor shake the fragile ground,
The only "peace" a silence, sharp and profound,
After the blast, before the next shell's scream –
A vacuum filled with horror's waking dream.

Now, back beneath the paper peace's dome,
He carries home a different kind of roam.
The quiet hums not with a gentle grace,
But with the echo of that shattered place.
The hush of fields? It holds the ambush dread.
The cooling dusk? The tracer's fiery thread.
The mother's song? A keening on the wire.
The fragile truce? A ceasefire's dying pyre.

He knows the peace the sheltered souls proclaim –
A flimsy curtain, whispering a name
They cannot grasp. The peace they think they own
Is just the surface, resting on the bone
Of deeper silence – vast, implacable, cold –
The peace of endings, stories bought and sold
In blood and terror. His peace is the ache,
The vigilance that sleep will never shake,
The ghostly weight upon his chest each dawn –
The heavy calm that settles when the pawns
Are swept away, and only stillness reigns
Over the broken bodies on the plains.

He is the keeper of the cruelest art:
He knows true peace resides within the heart
Of devastation. It's the hollowed ground,
The final stillness where no sound is found
Except the wind through ruins. Bright and deep?
It's what the dead alone are left to keep.
The living soldier bears the bitter cost:
He sees the real peace, beautiful and lost,
Forever out of reach, a mocking shore
He glimpsed in hell... and can't believe in anymore.