Robert Pietrzak
West Haven, Connecticut

Seventy-six years have weathered this frame, 
yet nineteen still smolders—unyielding flame. 
In jungles of memory where nightmares reside, 
vines of the past knot heaven to hell’s side. 

The therapy chair groans beneath my weight, 
Dr. Martinez speaks—calm, measured, straight. 
“Trauma,” “processing”—echoes rebound, 
off bunker-thick walls where silence is sound. 

The world keeps a rhythm I’ve long cast away— 
breakfasts, small talk, children at play. 
How can I tell them that calm feels like threat, 
that silence remembers what I can’t forget? 

The Purple Heart gathers dust on the shelf, 
a witness to loss, to a hollowed-out self. 
Fragments abandoned where battle left scars, 
ghosts still return like unfading stars. 

In group, we exhume what time tried to conceal— 
old soldiers like fossils the tide will reveal. 
We brush off the layers, trembling with care, 
grief rising raw in fluorescent glare. 

Frank weeps for his brother who never returned, 
I feel the same fire, though its embers have burned. 
“What do you want now?” asks the voice in the room. 
I picture my wife by her roses in bloom. 

She tends her garden in gentleness, light— 
no scanning horizons, no guarding the night.  
Perhaps I have time to grow peace like her flowers,  
to rest without counting the dark, endless hours. 

The war drums inside grow softer each day— 
not silent, but distant, their fury decays. 
Whispers now fall where explosions once roared,  
like rain washing clean what battle had scored. 

I’m learning to honor both warrior and sage: 
the boy who met battle, the man of this age. 
I cradle my demons, release what they sow, 
and welcome the self I’ve long yearned to know. 

After decades in trenches, I’m laying down arms, 
released from the grip of relentless alarms. 
My wounds still run deep—but at last I can see: 
from battle’s ashes, a new man is set free.