Thousands of boys . . . too young

To drink hot alcohol in winter

Or cool beers in Indian summers

Die 

Boys who only a summer before had been

Playing basketball and mowing dewed grass

Sun-kissed and sweaty

That sweet sweat only a young man can boast

And every young girl can smell

Boys who had promised pretty girls

They would take them away to cooler places

In old souped-up cars

And for ten dollar meals

It had been years and they still went and died

Everyone cared but the crying didn't matter

Both young wives and older wives sobbed,

Over crisply-pressed American Flags

And at quick funerals while babes clung to their skirts

And while they tried to remember the last time

They shared a wind-breezed glance

With the young man who now lay

Much too still under a shallow earth

It had been too many months and marches were few

There were no drafts and most college kids

Deftly assumed their studies

Affairs with MySpace and endless texts without protest

The intellectuals talked a lot but didn't seem

Mad enough or very mad at all

Sunday morning news flashed names and ages of the dead

Younger than a nephew, older than a neighbor

Young men and women from places

Some of us will never visit

Places like Indiana, Chicago, Mississippi and Hawaii

Last week a boy from my mom's home town

It had been so many days

That I had to save calendars to remember

Sound bites and debates now

Floated through my much older ears and I was numb

There was a story about an American soldier

Who adopted a boy from Iraq

Cerebral palsy inflicted his tan small body

Left in an institution to die

The soldier brought him to the U.S.

He said he felt they were meant for each other

Both injured for life

It had been so long since they started dying

That I had been numbed

From too many numbers

So many 18 and 40-something year-olds

Men who instead should have attended baseball games with their fathers

Men who should have cheered on their favorite team

Drinking sodas like Coca Cola

Eating food like hot dogs

Coming home with sunburns, smiles and too-loud voices

Or a gripe about how their favorite team lost

Due to an unfair call

It had been years since I went to a game

But I thought how a stadium might look filled with

All the boys who might still be alive

The dead of war, the boys who only a summer before

Drank their first beer on a secluded road

With a cute neighborhood girl

Who only months before owned his first car

And a joy ride or two

Who only hours before had looked

Across a lonely desert or war-torn street

Who only seconds before had died

With a bomb or gun shattering

His last, too-young, embryonic emotioned breath

It had been seconds and hours

And yet another winter shouts heated

Hot and burning

Crying over wine and shaking through wind

Yet I shiver though cooler heat waves

Even though so many colder bodies lay still

Beneath this soul-shallowed earth