Two Mornings on Omaha Beach

They came from the north.
Maybe some saw
the sun in its rising
off to the left,
coming up clear,
lighting ahead for their good

and lighting upon for their doom.

To my right is it struggling
to break through the gray?
Or maybe beneath
it’s tasting its final
moments of cover
before the exposure
pebbles may never obscure.

Three months, March to June
a steady increase
from frigid to cool,
perhaps never numbing
was surely unnoticed,
for bullets, not water,

were stinging their flesh on that day.

I’m wearing three layers,

the wind is not biting
and thus my descent
to that first enclosure
brings me no shivering
till after I slowly
and gingerly enter the dark.

Open wide,
and naked,
(flanked by the walls)
from knee-deep and on
to vast yellow death-field
that offered no shelter
they asked that their loved ones be told so.

Searched, known,

from rising to lying
and far sides of seas
and Sheol’s dark couches,
feebly reciting
a comforting song
I ask the soul-searchlight to flood out this bunker.

Anxiously waiting for handwritten letters

are mothers and wives,
fathers and sisters,
longing
to read them to sons
and daughters without a telegrammed message.

I hit play on my camera
and there they are peeking
‘round corners and laughing;
two three-year-old children
share no common words
but now share they neither
distinction of Allied and Axis.

Craft floated in
and doors were pushed open
to water and salt
to sand and sharp metal,
and on that first wave
nine out of ten
tasted of having blood shed.

In shallow tide pool

I taste
and I look again
this time at her picture
and ache
from the “no, don’t leave them behind”.

But many were left
in homes or left buried
in green Norman pastures.

We were not left.
For in the Invasion,
broken humanity’s
beachhead encountered the Crucial assault.