Who are the wives of the saint and the brute?
She who loved her husband and she who loved her husband.
Husband, you've returned to us
covered in blood and dust, covered
in bits of gore crawling with flies.
Let me wash your clothing, let our son
tend to the horse while you
scrub the battle from your sore skin
with hot water, sweet herbs.
This war, it keeps you far
from our fire; it has closed
your face; it has written
on your chest unreadable verses.
Have you no hunger? You shame me
by refusing millet from our pot.
And do you think I don't notice
the stink of another woman on your sex?
How am I to honor a man who feeds
his appetite in another village,
rests in the shade of a stranger's tree?
No rest for me. Our children wake at night
to the new voice of Sudan: screams and screaming
mortars from the dark's hundred corners;
their father making corpses out of mourners.
Leslie McGrath lives in Stonington, CT and works as an integratve health counselor. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Ireland, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2004 Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook, Toward Anguish, won the 2007 Philbrick Poetry Award and was published by The Providence Athenaeum. She is the submissions editor for Drunken Boat and a recipient of a 2007 Artist Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. Her interview with poet Dick Allen is forthcoming in The Writers' Chronicle.
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