The Names Remember

Will de Kypia

               Another DC summer day.

               Ninety degrees and so muggy you

               could slice the air with a KA-BAR.

               One suit in the crowd of tourists wearing

               T-shirts and shorts, sandals and sunblock,

               I stare at the Wall. Names I can't forget say

<We don't remember you at all>                  

               Why am I here again, sweat beading my

               forehead, soaking my searsucker suit?

               That boy who spent a year in Vietnam is

               not the man staring at those names today.

               Why do they still matter so much to me?

<If you'd died with us you’d still be young>                

               We had a mission to accomplish and

               everyone understood it: Come back.

               Come back alive, and whole, and sane.

               Quit being John Wayne, find your civvies,

               start living this new life you've been issued.

               If you were lucky like me. Thirty-seven

               years ago I strode from an airplane into

               the morning of the first day of my new life.

               I owned nothing but a duffel bag and the

               future. No clue what came next yet I knew

               whatever path I took would be the right one.

               Survival had already justified my life.

               Now the life would justify my survival.

<Mission accomplished?>                       

               I am older than my father was when he died

               and my reflection in the Wall is pear shaped.

               Reviewing my life I find two bitter ex-wives

               and four children seldom seen or spoken to.

               Plus countless professional disappointments,

               fractured friendships, and failed relationships.

               So many bad decisions and foolish choices!

               The life has been a failure, a sorry loser's tale

               told without purpose or meaning or even a plot.

<We woulda done better, way better>         

               My name belongs on the Wall next to

               these. I wish I had died over there too.

<All present or accounted for, Sir>         

                What if I just take myself out? Give

                up the fight, choose darkness not—

                                                   

                          Dinky dow, old man, crazy talk.

                     Yeah, we remember, you were there.

                   But you didn't come back in a body bag.

             People visit this Wall, read our names, wonder

           what we might have done with the lives we gave.

              Then they go on squandering their own lives.

                   Lives full of dreams and schemes, lists

                of things they will definitely do someday if

                  they can ever stop regretting yesterday.

            You stand with one foot in the present moment

              while the other stretches to paths that won't

                   exist unless you choose to step them.

                  Welcome home, Pilgrim. We figure it's

                   time you started to live your new life,

                     the new life some of us never got.

                                                ~