WALL Poem by Tom Sleigh

On this side of the wall, the well-lit room
lights gilt pages that luxuriate

in ornate capitals commemorating kings,
while there, on the other side, smoke and fire

press against the wall, where the stick-figure soldier
huddles away from the explosions, dwarfed

by the smoke column rising. The young Marine
at Quantico who calls me on his cell

feels the full weight of the wall pushing up
beyond the barracks walls he lives in,

swaying in the sun, swaying as if to
fall on him as he focuses on Clausewitz,

Sun Tzu's Art of War, Commandant Gray's Warfighting . . .
The wall ripples from the ground on up into

the sun, and only if you let go of your
human shape and only if your body

bleeds into the wall's flat vertical
can you feel that altitude and lift

as in an elevator shooting to
the top so fast that even when it stops

you feel yourself hurtle through the air:
hold onto yourself if you enter the wall's

sub-atomic storm, where everything is motion
and not the huge kings or tiny foemen

snarled in gilt vines can keep safe from the wounds
seeping through the wall to where the soldier

smooths back his hair, the bombardment healing over
to the puckered, ashen smolder of a scar.