Dropping Bombs

This is still in revision, but my poetry class liked it and so I'm posting it here. On the subject of loss...

"Dropping Bombs"

I’ve written a letter, folded it into an airplane, and I’m sending it off
to drop bombs on you.
It’s safe here in the forest. I hear the whippoorwill at night, the peeping frogs.
I still catch fireflies in the same jars you filled with sand from Desert
Storm.

It’s time to ask you again.
When I asked before I was too young to fear the answer and you
were already tired,
but you tried to protect me.
Now that you put away your uniform you don’t know what to wear.

Andy tells me stories that end with: “And that’s why they hate us,”
After the IED went off in the market,
after his gunner dropped the Iraqi family’s only TV,
after he shot a dog in the face.

You shot dogs too, in Turkey.
You picked bullets out of hostages’ pillows in Grenada.
You woke every morning in Kuwait, expecting
craters, but I’m not trying to ask you if
Andy’s right. I don’t need to know “why they hate us.”

It’s time to ask you again
—now that I am grown and you are Cochise and my fireflies have all died in their jars—
how many?

I don’t want to hear the stories about why they hate us and we hate them.
I don’t want to hear about your friend, dead on a pole with his own penis in his mouth,
how you dipped your bullets in pig fat. Revenge.

I want to know (I don’t want to know)
I need you to tell me (please don’t ever tell me)

How many lives have you ended when you told yourself you were protecting me?

It doesn’t matter.
We can still catch fireflies in jars and play our guitars together and I will still protect you, Daddy, from your monsters,
and if you listen, quiet
you can hear the whippoorwill.

~Jess d'Arbonne