Army Poem #03: Standing at Attention in Missouri

Green black and brown Army patterns
Pass by me while the whistle blows and
The dusts muddies with the sweat on my skin.
Staring straight ahead, my sight is a line
To a pebble in a red brick of a barracks,
I dare not move. This morsel of a block
In a wall is all I can see for now.
And the pebble explains eons to me,
Telling tales of high winters and hot suns,
Unbearable times never seen. I see the past
  Sawed in half.
The sergeant’s whistle blows in my ears, but not for me.
A story lives in the cracks of the rock,
The largest splint in the pebble explains
A tall tale how the scar appeared,
One of blizzard, misfortune, and one hundred years:
Says the water came in a torrential splay
As the cows brayed and prayed for shelter,
Asking the farmer to comply any way or how,
So he did grumbling as he trudged against the wind
To the pasture where the rain switched to sleet
Of its own accord, the temperature plummeted,
All at once the water froze in the rock
And the last cow went in
As the farmer’s back went out
As he slipped on the rock, all for the damned holstein;
He limped to the house, the rock wedged, defeated, both.