Charles J. Prusik

MOURNING’S BLACK VEIL

Children sent to war
Aged but a score
Never really knowing
What they are dying for
Unaware of grandiose schemes
Only of dim political themes

And so it was in our land
A decade or so ago
America’s line of heroes
Sent out to die
As the drums did roll
To seek the vibrant souls
Of all those gallant young men
Fair and dark
Forfeit of freedom of life and limb
Falling in conflicts of terror
In jungle slime so dark and dim
When the drums of war did roll

While wives and mothers wait
Weeping. weeping
Sons’ and Fathers’ fate
Ah. You greedy bastards of war
Feral spawnings of the whore
Count your silver tithes
And hear not Mothers wail
nor see desolate wives
in mourning’s black veil

©Copyright Friday June 13, 1986 by Charles J. Prusik

Author’s Note: The above poem, Mourning’s Black Veil took me three years to write, mainly because I could not find an ending to it. that is until the day of one of the first “Welcome Home” parades was staged on Friday the 13th of June 1986 in Chicago, Illinois.

The parade began at the old Navy Pier, passed down Michigan Ave. with cheering crowds and ticker tape, and finally ended at Grant Park. There, the parade organizers had brought the Moving Wall to Chicago.

I was looking for panel 31 east when I noticed a lady with an arm full of roses, all dressed in black, and wearing a mourning veil. She was going from one panel to the next, where she would lay a rose at the base of the panel, kneel, and say a prayer, then got up and repeated the process at the next panel.

Then I realized I had the ending for this poem. For to me, she represented every mother, wife, girlfriend, or woman who had ever seen her man off into harms way and had lost him to some petty social/political whim.