By singular light your mind made brushstrokes

inside a canvas of reticent ghosts

where right hand guides left – like Antigone.

But death will not exfiltrate the palette,

nor the marionette made by Mauser

 

and dropped by God upon your Stateside years

…like you dropped the man with no countersign.

They heard you say, ‘brought out the art in me’ –

burnt umber on long-range reconnaissance.

That is how the night would remember you.

(Note: Horace Pippin (1888-1946) was an African-American veteran of the First World War, earning the French Croix de Guerre. His art was a catharsis to purge the horrors of warfare from his memory.)