This is the day he says goodbye. His uniform is faded. His boots, the same ones from the last war, are worn. He's thirty-nine years old, but they are calling up men as old as fifty. He's still handsome, his wife says. When his children say, "goodbye Daddy" and kiss him, they believe they’ll see him again.

And so he goes to muster with the troops in their motley uniforms. His beard is flecked with gray, his eyes unduped. His shoulder remembers the rifle sling. While orders are given, a few lines of Hafiz float in his head. "Carry your heart through the world like a life-giving sun," but how will he do that with a rifle?

He moves out with the young, fidgety on dreams, eager to use their guns. Women stand on the sidewalks, watch and wave. He doesn't look.

Oh, this crowd of excited boys. The sky will burn them. They'll live in the smell of sweat and shit. There will be lice and diarrhea. If they’re lucky. And can he be lucky twice? Come home with only shrapnel? No. There’s no exit from this path. The enemy capital holds a hundred streets; one will be, for him, the last.

As he marches, his footsteps say, his pants legs say: what is, what is, what is.  Almost a poem. The order was given. His soles hit the dusty street over and over and over. Things cannot be different.

Some young men don’t march with him. Their parents set them on a plane and now they fly, sipping coffee and looking out the window. Their feet will alight on golf-course grass, deep carpet, sparkling tile. Beirut, Paris, Dubai. Wouldn’t he do that too if he had money? But he will remain on the ground. He has never risen into the sky, heard propellers roar. In this war like the last one, he will travel by truck and battered ship.

He has never ascended those stairs that lead to clouds; he never will. Unless it’s true what some have said, what happens after the choking gas, the burning and writhing, the shaking ground, deafening roars, thirst, exhaustion, blood, and screams. Is there a place of peace, above, beyond? It might be so. But what’s ahead he knows for sure. Fate gave the signal. He walks toward it, in his pocket, a pencil and smudged notebook; in his head, poems. Where do the unwritten verses go?