Veteran's Daughter

‘Daddy, I shall never know how you endured,
 for I am only your daughter’

A rickety old path leads
to the stone of your final home.
Here, where the sea air greeted
your return home.

Two wars you survived
long ago before I existed.
How you survived I’ll never know.

I can’t even imagine the tests,
the trials that leveled your youth
at barely eighteen years old.

Even when your own father
was so destroyed by his own service
that it drove him mad and you knew this.
Hearing him cough from what
he endured and knowing how he
fought for his life bare-handed on
battle lines taking another life to
save his own.

I’ll never know.
And your older brother had barely
already survived one of the worst battles in
history and you still faced the challenge
of your life and came back alive.

I’ll never know your strength.
The stone that marks your life
is the one affirmation and the path
is the one requital to my own
here, where you begin and end
in this, our early home.

‘In honor of Memorial Day’