Fire At Will (Version 2 After Being Critically Fired Upon) Poem by Ted Sheridan

The questions you ask
young lady, young man
of our nation and my generation,
is nothing unexpected.
Just like the blood
our dead brothers and your forefathers shed;
they beg to be given answers.
And to those of us
who have seen and survived
War’s red and dividing fire.
Those answers are like the hallowed
voices of the silenced dead.
And to you they seem
like hollow empty words;
to be held in suspicion and with contempt
by a dark blindness of truth and light.
Freedom means nothing to those
who have never had to fight
for the love of a country.
Freedom is nothing more than a
whored out allegiance
recited by the morally impaired
and wounded as their battle flag
passes in parade,
to honor those memorialized by time.
In truth,
Freedom is a phenomenon
known only to those who have sacrificed;
suffering its scars, nightmares, and horror.
While to those who have only benefited and been gifted
their national treasure; to those
neophyte’s untrained deaf ears.
The answers we gave as reasons
are heard as meaningless anthems
only veterans proudly hail;
old fashioned patriotism and imperialist
propaganda now stale.
When the point of fact
young lady, young man…..
we the tired, we the old….
have lied to cover the truth;
not as our inheritance left to you
but rather more of what we had to do
and if so asked would do again.
Out of a deep and abiding love for what
God and America have given to us all…
“Freedom is not just another word”
It is the basis of all that is good
and the destruction of all that is evil.

2008 © T S