Bill Roberts, Poet

Comrades in Arms

Author: Bill Roberts

– Our warriors don’t start the wars, they finish them

I finally list to a halt at your grave,

Clarence A. Reverski,

killed in action on June the 6th, D-Day,

1944, on the sand below the nearby cliffs,

perhaps on ominous Omaha Beach.

Your sleek, rounded alabaster cross

is one of many, interspersed by the occasional

six-pointed star, all arranged in precise

mathematical geometry in this vast, pristine

cemetery containing the remains of 9,387

noble Americans who sacrificed their lives.

You were a young sergeant from Michigan,

I read on your cross, causing my emotions

suddenly to well over, my stifled sobs

unnoticed by hundreds of other visitors

paying their quiet respects on this somber day

as a pale sun illumines tidy, close-cropped

grass at Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy.

I collect myself, glance at a cross behind yours,

its inscription reading simply:

Here Lies In Honored Glory

A Comrade In Arms

Known Only to God.

How great was your courage,

how near impossible your task,

how valiant your final moments.

To you, Clarence, and your fallen comrades,

Hail!  I salute you.

Your valor in battle so profound,

our pledge, Never Again, so shallow.

So shallow.

(Published in the June 2009 online issue of Long Story Short)

This poem came to me in a flash when my wife Irene and I made a return visit, forty years later, to the emotion-charged American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, in the fall of 2007.  I was weary, maybe lacking nourishment, and suddenly overcome when I stopped at Sergeant Clarence A. Reverski’s grave.  War is not my choice as an answer to threats, negotiation is.  However, World War Two was a just war, and our warriors, as they always do, fought valiantly, particularly during and after the D-Day invasion, facing terrible circumstances.  You must visit the invasion beaches (or, as the French prefer to call them, Liberation Beaches) and see those terrible cliffs, atop which the Nazis were so formidably entrenched to understand the focus of that vast battle.  I highly recommend a visit.  My hope is to return again someday, to visit loved French friends and beloved noble Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice.  I keep them in my prayers.

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