Aftermath

After the war, I went home except there was no house left.
When I asked about it, they shook their heads and said
"Where were you? If you had been here- this wouldn't
have happened."
I smell the ash, the looks of misunderstanding, not that
they would know why I couldn't have stayed nor why
now I know I shouldn't have come back home.
After the war, I went back to walk the roads of my youth
hoping to find something I had thought I lost but only to
find I had abandoned it as surely as I had given up any
hope that the loves and passions that consumed my
childhood would could remain as the winds blew away
what little is left of those memories.
After the war, I returned to what I had only believed that
I had known but discovered instead that I had always been
a stranger among the people who I would have called family
neighbors or friends. I feel the scorn of their collective pain
as I walk away without the answers that I had longed for
from my past.
After the war, just walk away from all that you thought you were
fighting and dying for, the future is not littered with the bodies of
past regret.
There are no winners in war, only the losers who have died,
those that survived, there are no solutions just the resolution
that we probably forgot what all the fighting was for.