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Teaching Map-Reading To Draftees (poem)

By rg cantalupo

Navigation by dark was the lesson,
but it was never that alone.

For here the map and the terrain
were one, the course more than
the checkpoints they found or lost,
or the three-day pass they might win
by being the first team in.

The nineteen-hour flight to a war
no training could teach them
to understand would always
come too soon. No, the red lens
they held in their hands was like

so many colors they would soon
learn to read by catching more than
light or hue or lines. A few weeks
and the slow parachutes
of red, blue, and green flares

would rain down over everything
they were—their hands, their faces,
their fatigues, even their expressions
would change under the firefight's
kaleidoscopic light—

and the mortar's red flash, the AK's,
the rocket grenade's,
would tinge their eyes
with a redness through which
they would ever read The World—

the map no longer paper
in their hands, but a memory,
a place, a reddened leaf on a hill
somewhere, a hole in the wet earth
an inch too shallow to save a man—

—rg cantalupo