Wednesday Is Poetry Day

Here's a really wonderful debut work by Publicola. It's meter is very musical. Guess I'll have to start calling him the "Bard of Ballistics" now. Or maybe Mr. "Terror Dactyl."

The Post

Even through the glove I felt it seeping from the metal till my bones ache
Just slightly
The cold is on the metal; the wood, then on my cheek
The almost perfect roundness close to my eye is lost
The bite of the leather in my flesh disappears
Forgotten
As is the cold on my skin and in my bones
Only a tiny column imposing itself on the object I desire to reach has focus
The cold doesn't matter
The feel of the wood doesn't matter
Metal doesn’t matter
The weight of the lever I'm pushing towards myself means nothing
Only the column
The rectangle I know, the rectangle I need
The pillar that my will rests upon
It alone is my world at the same time it isn't alone
Breathe
Stop
The lever lightens, yet becomes the hardest part of my world
Still I only know the rectangle
Nothing else matters 'cept for seeing that little stanchion where I will it to be seen
I don't even notice the break, like a rod
Not like a glass rod but still a distinct and noticeable breaking happens
Yet I don't notice
I only see the rectangle
I know the wood is pushing me back
I hear the muffled boom through my heart as well as my ears
But I only see the rectangle
Rising slightly, lifting itself momentarily above my desire only to settle back down to it again
The metallic shucking of the mechanism tells me it's ready again; that I'm ready again
But there's only that rectangle standing between me and my desire
Bridging the distance between me and my desire
I know the device; I've cleaned it, repaired it, cared for it
I've broken it so that I could build it again
It will not fail me
I can only fail myself
But that rectangle holds my faith, my confidence, my certainty that I won't
It rises again as the boom rolls over me
The boom that I hear but pay no mind to
My heart races, my breath begs for release
I only know the rectangle
Six more times metal slides across metal
Wood heats; expands
Gasses slave to my design; working for me more than against me
Then I heed something other than the rectangle
A ping
A cold metallic sound to others, to me a thing of beauty and sadness at the same time
Whether to fuel the tool or not? Whether to enable the tool to function again or let it rest?
Those are not the questions I would answer here; they are for another time, another tale
Here I speak of the rectangle
What was beyond it? Paper or flesh? Food or enemy?
It did not matter
What I wished it to guide me to was decided long before I gazed upon its sharp lines and flat top
The rectangle will guide me as it always has
A rectangle on a tool made before I was born
Made the same year my father drew breath, years before my mother cried for the first time
A rectangle viewed through a circle; a post through an aperture
Sitting atop a tool made to control burning gas; expanding gas
To direct metal to repeat the task while the wood cradles it; gives it comfort
With leather to bind it to me
Me to it
To make us one
Odes cannot describe it and I when united
Words fail in their vulgarity and barbarism
A rectangle sitting on top of a cylinder made to spew smaller cylinders to affect my will?
How crass that sounds? How empty?
All my eloquence is inadequate to tell of how my eye links with that rectangle
Of how my heart beats inside the wood
How my breath hardens with the metal
How my mind burns the hole that the tool will make real
It is not a mere rifle of which I speak but a Garand
And not a mere Garand, but Mine

I think the best explanation of this poem was from USCitizen, who said: "The Post captures the focus, the essence, the gestalt of the aimed shot. The mental focus that erases the physical, that casts away all peripheral considerations and concentrates all effort on the only thing that matters: the rectangle through the ghost ring."