By John Bargowski

Don’t pat me on the back,
my heart wasn’t any softer,
or bigger than those other kids’
walking home from school that day,
but when he called over
to me from the crosswalk
I put my books down to help
after I saw the pastor’s palsied
hands trying to re-knot the laces
of his spit-shined black oxfords.
I’d heard the talk around the table
about the old warrior come home
with a shrapnel limp, the vet
of Korea and, not long ago,
our big brothers’ green hell,
here to soldier our parish
through the end of the Sixties.
And when I bent down
to retie the knot I got a whiff
of the same stale cigar smoke
that seeped past the confessional
screen the days Sister marched
us in to tell our puny sins
to this man who spent years
hearing the last words
of the wounded, then after
knotting the loops of his laces,
still kneeling on one knee
I tried to eyeball the ridges
and swirls on his right thumb
everyone swore were stained
with blood from hundreds of GIs
and the sacramental oil
of our brothers’ last rites.

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John Bargowski’s newest book is American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press). His first book, Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, was selected by Paul Mariani for the 2012 Bordighera Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest.