Free One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds

War
1. Woman with the Lettuce
    They are crowded in a line being shoved toward a truck.
    Some seem stunned, some sick with fear.
    She stands slightly outside the line,
    black hat clamped on her head,
    mouth compressed. In her hands she holds
    an oversized lettuce, its white stems and
    great, pale, veined leaves
    unfolded in the dense air. She stares
    directly at the camera, the large, delicate
    plant in her grip, its glowing vanes
    reaching out. Furious, she takes her
    last chance to look right at us.
2. Legless Fighter Pilot
    He takes his right calf in his hand,
    lifts the whole leg up, straight,
    turns, and swings it into the cockpit,
    sliding into the seat. The left leg he
    bends by hand at the knee, pulls it in, and
    slams the hatch, then in his aircraft
    he rises over the hills. In the sky
    no one can walk, everyone
    is a sitting duck, he banks and begins to hunt.
    He is not afraid of anything now,
    not even his coffin—hell, he is part
    native oak already, and if he
    lost his arms he’d replace them. All he
    wants is to bag as many as he can,
    crash them into the ground like birds into a sack with their
    useless legs trailing out the mouth of it.
3. What Could Happen
    When the men and women went into hiding,
    they knew what could happen if the others caught them.
    They knew their bodies might be undone,
    their sexual organs taken as if
    to destroy the mold so the human could not
    be made anymore. They knew what the others
    went for—the center of the body,
    and not just for the agony and horror but to
    send them crudely barren into death,
    throwing those bodies down in the village at dawn
    to show that all was ended. But each
    time the others dumped a body in the square,
    a few more people took to the woods,
    as if springing up, there,
    from the loam dark as the body’s wound.
4. The Dead
    The ground was frozen, the coffin-wood burned
    for fuel. So the dead were covered with something
    and taken on a child’s sled to the cemetery
    in the subzero air. They lay on the snow,
    some wrapped in rough cloth
    bound with rope, like the tree’s ball of roots
    when it waits to be planted; others wound
    in sheets, their gauze, tapered shapes
    stiff as cocoons which will split down the center
    when the new life inside is prepared;
    but most lay like corpses, their coverings
    coming loose, naked calves
    hard as corded wood spilling
    from under a tarp, a hand reaching out
    as if to the bread made of glue and sawdust,
    to the icy winter, and the siege.
5. When He Came for the Family
    They looked at their daughter standing with her music
    in her hand, the page covered with dots and
    lines, with its shared language. They knew
    families had been taken. What they did not know
    was the way he would pick her cello up
    by the scroll neck and take its amber
    torso-shape and lift it and break it
    against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the
    close-grained satiny wood, they stood and
    stared at him.
6. The Signal
    When they brought his body back, they told
    his wife how he’d died:
    the general thought they had taken the beach,
    and sent in his last reserves. In the smokescreen,
    the boats moved toward shore. Her husband
    was the first man in the first boat
    to move through the smoke and see the sand
    dark with bodies, the tanks burning,
    the guns thrown down, the landing craft
    wrecked and floored with blood. In the path of the
    bullets and shells from the shore, her husband had
    put on a pair of white gloves
    and turned his back on the enemy,
    motioning to the boats behind him
    to turn back. After everyone else
    on his boat was dead
    he continued to signal, then he, too,
    was killed, but the other boats had seen him
    and turned back. They gave his wife the medal,
    and she buried him, and at night floated through
    a wall of smoke, and saw him at a distance
    standing in a boat, facing her,
    the gloves blazing on his hands as he motioned her back.
7. The Leader
    Seeing the wind at the airport blowing on his hair,
    lifting it up where it