Desultory Aftermath
(in the style of John Allan Wyeth’s This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets)

He studied foreign languages in school:
Italian, Greek and Latin, German, French.
or so his records indicated when
The Great War called and Woodrow Wilson sent
John Allan Wyeth, young and willing tool,
to ravaged Europe nauseous with the stench
of grim and gruesome, pointless carnage. Then,
in later years, he cast in verse thoughts meant
to recollect his service time: a spool
of memory, unwound through mud and trench
and ad-hoc duties towards a rendezvous
with anti-climax where two stricken men
chance to converse, both of them tired and spent:
one wounded, and the other sick with flu.