THE ABERDEEN ORDNANCE MUSEUM By Stephan Foy

In inflexible rows, like furrows plowed by a machine, They line the field, and their tracks oppress the grass. The raw steel of their tracks pollutes the earth with rust. Long-necked guns and squat tanks of war all peeled with rust, Refuse of the machine wars of this century,

They hulk against the Maryland April

And sit brooding in the morning like lions' bones,

Once terrible, now no more than dreams.

A sleek-breasted bird hops along the rusty armor of a tank And with his fragile beak picks once

At the torn edge where

In our fathers' time an insane-voiced shell

Terminated its fine parabola in a point of white energy That worked steel like butter

And punched through and set up the ragged edge

On the cenotaph

To what once filled the coffin blackness inside

With the grace of its presence.

The bird is gone, and the sunshine

Comes through the hole to slice the black. Inside

All smells damp and of rust;

A broken bottle catches light to disturb the floor;

Someone has decorated the rotting machine-gunner's seat

With a crushed paper cup.

No more.

Only the armor now; the flesh it once sheltered is gone.

A visible bullet lies imbedded

In the steel hide of the ponderous war machine.

Rub fingertips across this forever frozen instant.

How kinder these fingers could have been to that flesh

Than steel, than a snouted shell vomited from Atlantic war.

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