Sunlight for Jason

I.
Selling your soul—as if!
Ain’t no givin’ that thing away—
Like an embarrassing ornament—it stays,
Like a thumb on a butcher’s scale
Where you weigh flesh and gold
—But you’re no butcher.
There is no skill or honor—in what you do,
Unless forgetting all but what you want
Is a skill, and trading on trust
Like you had something to give.
And all because they all still had it—
That measly, loving, generous thing—
How you wanted most of all to take its power away,
Because, while you said with straight face
You didn’t have it,
You couldn’t shuck off its sway.

II.
In another place, you might learn to play your trumpet the perfect way.
But the general who conducts you makes you hit the notes wrong so he can scold you.
That’s how men are built, and you’ve drank of that truth in your darkest, deepest parts.
And from it you tried to build your battalion out of the mercenaries they gave you,
And tried to make them believe, as you did, in a flag
You put a gun to your own head to have faith in,
And now you want to give them something—of yourself;
The right way to dress, how to say something without giving anything away,
How to contend with those who think knowing how to kill gives them the right to.
In this, you found a son who can learn—he wants what you have, he knows less than you.
Why, you ask, can’t heaven give me that? Instead, the other boys taunt him, and let him
Fall down without picking him up, even after you’ve made him a leader,
Even after you told them to rely on his judgment as if it were your own.
They say, with the same old two-faced anger, that they want more from you:
To be told what to do so that they can disobey,
To be rewarded not corrected for doing things their way,
Which is just another way of saying that they see through your lies
Instead of learning what they mean. The old world has gone,
The young are allowed to think they know everything, but it’s not a great mystery—
Can power with nothing else command not just obedience but respect?

Apparently not. The chain that holds the cross is breaking down.
The general you’d waited on so long to hang up his sword
Wanted you and your son to take a chance at command, but the fates,
In the faces of those selfish boys who only saw you as the vengeance you wrought
Exposed your battle plans, and all your scars, to high command.
But you are a soldier. You can survive on k rations and half-hearted salutes,
But why don’t they want to be men? You ask again and again. There is no being right,
Or feeling joy, or having a purpose in this task you assign. There is only learning.

You withheld many medals, but until you made them nothing,
They did not see the honor in what a soldier does,
To kill and give their lives for nothing but a rich man’s greed
Yet hear the orders come from angels, and know they lead to truth.