POETRY
Of Bow Ties and Battlefields
A Memorial Day poem
Published in
2 min readMay 25, 2020
When I was a young lad
Papa used to say
you can tell a lot about a man
by the way he ties his bow tie
Front and center was a sign of dignity
Papa lived his whole life that way
dignified to the very end
When the draft came
I took my dignified bow tie
to the jungles of Vietnam
but this was no place for dignity
Only death and the dying consumed me
I remember hearing Papa say
pick your battles boy
or someone will pick them for you
How could I tell him that the battles raging here
were not just in rice paddies
but charging full speed ahead in my mind?
Broken in mind and body
shame followed me home
I couldn’t shake the dead
nor could I face my Papa
