Letter From Carthage

by Redd Ryder

He wrote of subjects he wouldn’t talk to us about, of bodies piling up

Like peanut shells on a barroom floor, crushed underfoot

By advancing tank phalanxes. Assuring our mother, before she was our mother,

That his sifting of Desert War sand had revealed no Keatsian worlds to speak of

More peaceful than ours is, filling his monogrammed leather journal

In a hand inspirited by the nearness of Carthage. Entries to lure her thoughts away

From present danger, the Second Battle of El Alamein, towards the Second Punic War,

When the Carthaginians lost everything except their courage and our interest.

Hannibal’s elephants, especially in defeat, casting big shade

On the triumphant wolves of Scipio Africanus. As if to say, Yo, Scipio, dude,

Let Rome bay; while Carthage, in ruins, accounted a loser, endures,

Preeminent in the hearts and minds of not so Rome-centric historians

And the romantics among us. Poets of a certain bent. In theses of Punic War specialists.

Like that hapless football team you wouldn’t bet on but just can’t help rooting for.

That my father, not yet my father, was a fanboy of Carthage

–As he was of my mother–dug a foxhole we shared and still share, our deep love

Of family and history. A pharmacist in peacetime, in letters unseen and unsent

He served up fresh prescriptions for adoration, telling of his absence without leave

From the Army’s Medical Corps, if only for a few hours, risking brig or firing squad

If charged with desertion. For history. For her. Before he had earned his Bronze Star.

Making his journal, discovered by us in a drawer after her death, that much more compelling.

Day-tripping out of his head, carillons of war theatrically hushed for a time

As were walkies of general staffers scouting desert terrain from camoed Jeeps,

Axis and Allies respectively plotting next moves, Rommel and Montgomery,

Chess championship of the dunes down to those two, searching for any signs of weakness

In their rival’s game, my father saw his chance and took it, going AWOL

To survey the ruins, one man squatting on a bit of wall, his cursive retelling

Of city-states facing off across the Mediterranean interrupted by a call to arms.

Around the hip-curve of North Africa, battle-weary men fought and fought again

As in the Punic Wars, the Axis’ hope for world dominion

Foundering on Maghreb’s shores. In that brief interlude when the guns fell silent,

Conducive to writing letters home, triceratopsian armor taking a deep breath,

Arms and legs having flown off more often than Allied sorties, my father described

Taste-testing a pinch of sand for some hint of its signature saltiness, the rot beneath the skin

Of bodies left too long in the sun, this spot he was in having seen too much death.