The Insurgent
Eliot Khalil Wilson
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2017 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Margaret Reid, Traditional Verse
No one saw him climb over the Hesco*
barriers, so he just appeared and walked
under the lights where no one ever goes.
An actor who moves in my sleep, he talked
to the air, his hands tucked under his arms.
A boy who might have been cold or wired.
A cattle herder from the nearby farms
or Taliban out to plant an IED.
We knew the protocol of escalation,
hand signals, warning shots, the distance limit.
He walked, we fired—what was termed a precaution.
The boy was deaf, we learned, and slow-witted.
He was born the way we had learned to be.
No wind could lift that bloodied sand to sea.
*Modern gabion—a collapsible wire mesh container and heavy duty fabric liner used as a temporary to semi-permanent levee or blast wall against explosions or small-arms.
