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by D.A. Gray
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(“Cold Sunrise, Bedrock” mobile version)
Still awake in our fighting positions
we felt mud seeping through the sleeves;
cheeks rested on the pillows of rigid
rifle stocks.
——————Something in the woods
of Eastern Europe whispered; I heard
the trill of a nightingale, and footsteps
on wet leaves, displaced young branches,
their bending and snapping back –
a sound too steady for human feet.
That hour when the eyes lied,
we leaned against the rock edges, listening.
I could feel the rifle’s hard plastic grow colder
against my face and knew morning
would break before long. Dark saw-toothed
leaves began to separate from other dark
leaves.
———-A breeze.
————————And as the forest exhaled
a thin blue flame cut a trail between the trunks.
As the earth began to warm heat retreated
upward out of our bodies and in its absence,
in that hour of daybreak, cold came down.
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D.A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain and Overwatch. His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Appalachian Review, Comstock Review, Still: The Journal, Collateral Journal, War, Literature & the Arts, and Wrath-Bearing Tree, among others. He holds Masters Degrees from The Sewanee School of Letters and Texas A&M-Central Texas. Gray now teaches, writes, and lives in Central Texas.
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