a collective love letter to those back home

We painted your faces in foreign soil
just like we tattooed your names to our teeth,
reminding ourselves with every click
just who, exactly, we were here for.

Justice is a beautiful word – so is democracy.
We are good men and women
but we do not cry at night because of justice,
and it is not democracy that we keep beneath our pillows.

We see enough misery
in one morning to last entire lifetimes.
The worst part: we are finally
learning how to live with it.

Everything is relative, you know,
even war. When we woke up and forgot
how many months it had been since
we’d held something other than steel,

we scrambled for your pictures,
the ones we taped to the backs of our eyelids
for emergencies like these,
and instantly remembered the soft skin

on the inside of your elbow.
You are the soldiers back home, patiently waiting,
whom we can only hope to emulate.
We may stand guard in history books one day,

but you –
you would never forgive us
for having left whole and strong and beautiful
and returning nothing but a number.