scornful sun

my limbs were lead, swinging at my sides languidly as i stumbled across the blood soaked field. the previously lush green hill had been trampled and drenched in tormented and mangled bodies, strewn about like puppets; feeding the earth with their flesh and fluids. my surrounding landscape should inspire triumph, a battle won with minimal loss. the faces buried in the mud and the bodies reaching out to me were soldiers i should consider my enemies. people who’s lives i’ve never touched nor known.

alas all i can see in every suit of armor is my beloved, my sweet dove, Edmund. his auburn hair peaked out of every helmet and his soft hands grasped every broken shield, he was littered across that blistering field.

my men were scattered before me, lifting up the bodies of their comrades and carrying them away to be buried in a mass grave, we had no time for proper burials. i looked dreadfully into the eyes of every fallen soldier i passed and only trudged forward when i knew for certain it was not my Edmund.

to soon had i reached the middle of the field, farther than my troops dared venture. there is where i saw the kneeling figure of a lithe man, his helmet dropped haphazardly a few paces behind him. i would know this man anywhere, by sight, touch, or sound alone. he gazed upon a limp figure at his knees. a boy not nearly the age of twelve.

a sob drew itself from my body and dragged me towards the man, unafraid of the ugliness laid in the field before him. i pulled him roughly away from the dreadful corpse of the child and forced his eyes to meet mine; they were cloudy and beheld to me his feelings of wretchedness for his supposed crime. a crime i compelled him to commit. a crime that really was my own.

my tremoring hand moved the sticky hair from his forehead and scrubbed away the mud there. i kissed the tears on his cheeks before pressing our foreheads together. his body convulsed when he could no longer contain the loathing despair of what he’d done, a frightful guilt for having taken such a life from the arms of a grieved mother who could show no sympathy for him.

his cries echoed in me, escaping my lips in a new garbled frequency that created a dissonant harmony in the air around us; a mournful groan that seeped into the field, inspiring an agonizing hum in the ground that fled to the roots of trees and burrows of animals.

the earth herself wrapped her arms around that heart-broken field and wept while the sun looked down in scorn.