The Soldier's Wife Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

Slinging, with a gun that glinted with valor,
Oh the ineptitude in my face’s squalor
How she had wanted to become veiled;
With a soldier’s hand at the small of her back,
That smile of his, portraying a cold war in between
My desire, and my obsession – I am entrapped
Between two hands like pillars, but never inside a heart

Singing, of memories from a warfare of souls
Freezing, from where the stifling cold wind blows
Scars, just to prove that in a man’s life, scars would portray
How disdain can commandeer a ship back to its port,
How amore can manipulate fate and other things
And how desolation can extinguish the flame of consolation –
I can never be a soldier, though I have feigned to be one

What is in a soldier that you are enamored to so much?
Is it his camouflaged frame of sullied brown and green
Or is it his rifle, sprawling down his adamantine shoulder?
Perhaps it is his stories, and how he has searched for you in the night
And how blinding it has been inside an ornate forest without light
So you chose to take his hand of calloused tragedies – famed stories

I admit, to this day, up to the last
That I am a jealous man, and I hate as fast
As winter, as stones tremble by the bay,
Like summer, how it razes the children’s day
Or perhaps, like no season at all – windless, starless, moonless, azure
A sky without constellations and clear from the presence of the clouds

How I envy you, poor, downtrodden soldier
And how you possessed her heart, with superb marksmanship
Take her to war, take her to peace – sojourn into the wild, cruise on a ship
I am jealous – and an envious man may be culpable to say, “You belligerent fool.”
Yet what depth of enmity, what height of antagonism cannot destroy
This bastion of a man, this fortress of a heart, this clemency in between souls
And so I lay there lifeless, like one of this soldier’s dead adversaries.

I watched the both of you, up in the heavens,
Yet underneath the fraying sheets of my room, where there is a battle!
I have no weapons to lay at hand – only frailty and wishful thinking
That you, the soldier’s wife, would come back to me, just like any other musing –
And understand that not every man can be a soldier, but every man can love
The truest – perhaps truer than a soldier’s heart.