Long before teaching out-of-town bigots etiquette lessons, I haunted a millennium of battlefields, and the dreams of braggadocious tyrants, for over ten millennia.
Do you wonder why I’m weary?
carving out
warriors’ flesh & despots’ hopes
a blood-dripping blade
Slaughtering scores of Connaught men at the fords. Breaking the advance of the Persians for three days at Thermopylae. Cutting down the last free Gaul at Caesar’s command. Loosing my longbow a thousand-thousand times to finish off the French cavaliers’ charge at Agincourt. Marching and fighting in campaigns innumerable, across continents, oceans, and centuries.
sowing
soldiers’ doom & kings’ despair
martial mastery
The scores of women I’ve loved and outlived, the grandchildrens’ grandchildren I’ve buried. The wounds, sicknesses, and calamities I’ve endured and overcome, ever whole and new, without even scars to mark them.
shedding
tears and memories
this ancient heart
The everlasting witness of societies repeating the same, senseless mistakes.
an immortal’s
unrealized desire
a good death
Melissa hosts dVerse Poets Pub’s Tuesday Poetics, where we write using zeugma.
The pub is open! Come join us!
Frank J. Tassone 
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