Lament Of Those Who Did Not Fall Poem by Roy Blokker

There are those who did not fall,
Who now stand, hunched, weighed down,
Whose stoic resistance
To the embrace of Death
Brought them home to just grow old
Clinging to memories
They now wish they did not own.
Each will succumb soon enough,
Each will take their place
Among their fallen comrades,
Among the innocent no one meant to kill,
Their names one by one read
On the scrolls drunk to in Valhalla.
Memorials float on the breeze
Like the strains of Last Post
Or the guitar strings snapping
In search of long lost songs;
And in these shadows cast
By aching monoliths,
Those who did not fall
Remember only sorrow
As bugles sound again.