What I Missed

Lao Rubert

For fifty years I wondered why you went to war without a fight,                      
ready to raise the flag, go to battle, wear 
the face paint, never thinking about the slog through mud 
or the pack on your back, only of glory, medals, applause

that never came, just the disdain you didn’t understand.
I see, now, in the mothers of young soldiers, what I missed then:                                                     
fear mixed with flags, with red, white, and blue cakes,
fireworks and uniforms.

I see what every family was saying but never out loud,
the one thing they couldn’t say, wouldn’t say.
I believed the chin-up language
until I watched her trembling face, her tightened lip,

heard her describe her life—military wife—
saw worries cover her like fog wisping around heavy boots,  
jaws clenched, alarms buzzing as the news broadcast soldiers
making rounds unwelcomed, unwanted by staring children.

How had I missed the dread swirling around the parades,
the pageantry, the spotless uniforms, the big talk that was the only way
to push back the terror that brightened a family’s eyes
when their son walked—all crisp and decorated—out the door?

---

Lao Rubert is a poet and advocate for criminal justice reform living in Durham, North Carolina. Her poems have appeared in—or are forthcoming—in Adanna, Atlanta Review, Barzakh, New Verse News, NC Poetry Society’s Poetry in Plain Sight, the Davidson Miscellany and Writers Resist. “What I Missed,” according to Rubert, “grew out of a workshop which included several military families. Until then, I’d only seen parades and bravado when the military was present. These families revealed—and I finally saw—the fear they lived with on a daily basis.”