Serbian Priest

Her broken son, like a limp tender shoot, was draped over her left arm, asleep; the mother wailed shrill screams at the priest kneeling near her in small puddles of blood. The air, filled with sounds of battle, was mute as though the shimmering burst of lights were flashes of heat lightning; soldiers were running in slow motion; they’d stop to shoot someone; she didn't care, she was a mute in a delirious dream. "He is asleep?" she begged. The Serbian priest nodded, blood dripped from the child's ear, and the sad priest whispered, "Assorbe..." then the tired priest looked at the boy's soft hand as if it were a sign of peace, "...libero." At once blood on the walk beside them; "How could one shoot a priest?" he thought as pain pulled him asleep. As morning broke over Tuzla, the mute sky had overtones of ochre; his mute lips prayed for the dead woman, for the priest failed as Father to his flock; two asleep and lost in a desperate war as were countless others; futile years that will shoot through offspring as mere footnotes in blood. The powerful whose hands are calm with blood and dark duplicity, know well to mute deceit with death, to debase life and shoot to their pinnacle, neither heeding priest nor peer, with profane conscience; but, were they born bent? Or, were the moral asleep? The pastor felt a foot, and heard, "Asleep?" as the boot rolled him over. “With all the blood, I thought that you might be dead; if it were not for me, you would be." Like a mute the cleric groaned, pointed to his wound. "Priest," he said dragging him to a wall, "to shoot a priest, ah, everyone thinks I will shoot them. We don't kill the religious." The priest squinted in thought: "In war, reason is mute." By David Ben Foster     From Meter, Muse & Rhyme