He’s probably 13 or 14, matchstick thin,
dressed in black pajamas like so many
Vietnamese, flip-flops, thick black hair:
but startled now, wild headlight eyes.
(He’d been walking the narrow jungle
trail, rifle casual over his shoulder, like
a 14-year-old carries a baseball bat,
when the American soldier stepped
into his path.) And the boy stands
frozen for a moment, then drops his
weapon and runs. The soldier snaps
his rifle to his shoulder, sights square
on the boy’s back, then hesitates. Do it,
he thinks. But in that second, the whisper
in his head—half-remembered words
from childhood wedged for weeks now
in some itchy corner of his brain—begins
its tuneless buzz: tongues of men,
tongues of angels, sounding brass, tinkling
cymbal. And as the boy vanishes, he lowers
his weapon, no longer a soldier.
