The Bullet’s Tale
Scott Ennis
War Poetry Contest 2004 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention
As I cooled I awoke
and felt the heat
and smelled the smoke
which never really seemed to clear away.
I was rolled into a machine
with a million of my brothers,
all the same, exactly like the others
with the name .223 stamped firmly on my back,
then quickly packed
into a cardboard box.
For months I waited,
rattling against my comrades
in the dark, hearing nothing.
Then a jet engine roar.
Then yelling and explosions.
My box was suddenly cracked harshly open
and I fell upon a foreign dusty ground.
I lay there, one round.
I saw the hand of Private First Class Galloway
pick me up, trembling slightly,
wild terror on his face.
Mingled with sweat and resignation,
breathing heavy
with his back against a wall,
he jammed me in his magazine.
He tapped the magazine
once against his Kevlar helmet
and I felt my self slide back,
seated properly
against some mechanism.
The magazine was then forced,
coated with sand and oil,
grating into his weapon.
I felt the bolt release
and kick me forward
locked and loaded,
and I stared straight up the barrel,
past the spiral rifling
and the flower-like flash suppressor
at the hot blue sky.
As PFC Galloway lowered his rifle,
my fate,
I saw in sequence:
a cloud,
a roof,
a wall,
a road,
a man.
Something exploded inside me
and I felt the rush
of the gun barrel
with a heated urgency.
The nameless lieutenant held
a Kalashnikov with a cracked stock,
bound by duct tape.
I rose in my trajectory
above his face
and saw his men fanned out behind him.
One wounded and grimacing in pain.
One desperately pulling at a jammed rifle.
One who looked like his cousin or brother.
Then I fell into his chest.
I tumbled through his gut
and all I saw was red blood
and all I heard was
the ripping sounds of fabric,
and the ripping sounds of flesh,
and the ripping sounds of organs, soft and subtle.
Then there was a dull thud
as I lodged firmly in the bone of his pelvis.
The battle noises eventually subsided
and I briefly heard women wailing,
then shovels full of dirt
thumping against a hollow chest.
It was dark and stank
of rotting flesh
for many months,
and then it was just dark.
It has now been a hundred years.
I never heard who won the war.
I just sleep here,
nestled in the pelvic bone
of one of the war's casualties.
I often think
about that cloud I saw
in that blue sky
beyond the rifling
and the flower-like flash suppressor.
