The Morrigan's Song

A soldier boy came home today. His camelbak lightly jouncing against his body as he walks into the arms of his young bride. She weeps into his chest, tears of relief and joy. He holds her, he kisses her, he laughs with her, but his outward gaeity never quite stretches into his eyes, always wary, always watching. They never losing the hard, damned stare, have squandered the essence that made him young. His youthfulness was burned away in gunpowder smoke, in blood, and the screams that wake him from his post traumatic dreams, his bedsheets fermenting with the night sweats. She senses the alteration in his spirit, that he is no longer the unseasoned man who knelt beside her before the altar on the day their union was blessed before God. He is no longer the boy who marched to the beat of the Morrigan's song.

A soldier boy came home today. After months wasting away in a military hospital, relearning how to walk, how to function , how to become a contributor of a capitalistic society. He feels the ghost pains of the arm and leg abandoned on the side of some desert highway, unnamed casualties of an IED explosion in the mutilated carcass of a military escort. His artificial titanium government issue prosthetics dully capture the arms of the summer sunlight, as he jerkily steps across the black pavement, the damp heat seemingly liquifying the distant tarmac with the caress of the Georgia sun. His rolling stuttering gait carries him home, away from the Morrigan's song.

A soldier boy came home today. His ebony casket draped in the red white and blue colours of his chosen nation's flag. His sobbing mother , near to collapsing, her quaking hands clutching a sodden tissue smeared with black mascara, dampened with tears. His stunned father stares at the pall with red fringed eyes. His wife sits on a folding chair, her face streaking with make up stained tears. Each drop a memory of their brief years together. She winces at the rifle volleys fired over his body, honouring the soul of a young man, though scared beyond anything he ever felt before, flung himself into the Morrigan's extended arms amidst the battle frenzy of rifle shots and hand grenades. The honour guard to heaven, in their smart dark blue dress uniforms, hand her the triangularly folded flag, which she grasps to her quaking bosom, the tear drops soiling the cotton fabric. She gazes up for a moment to spy a raven inspecting the proceedings, his beak open, cawing the farewell note of the Morrigan's song.

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