SHE CRADLED A TODDLER

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She cradled a toddler

Whose rubbery

Legs

dangled

Onto her lap of combat fatigues

Like a pair of drowsy willow branches

Along a gravel road in Georgia

And smiled like Mona Lisa 

The way she did in her high school yearbook

Which beneath her picture read:

“Most likely to succeed.”

Beneath her most recent Instagram post she wrote,

“I love my job.”


It was her instinct almost from birth

To protect things.

An orphaned dandelion

A fallen nestling 

An abandoned heart

Her own shadow 

Which clung to the hemisphere of her civilian skirt

Like the someday child at Abbey Gate.


It was Sgt. Gee’s job

That morning

To escort evacuees 

Onto the bird

Whose wings would fly them

To a future that she would

Never cook barefoot in

Never swirl to a country song

Never rest her head on the shoulder of 

her Marine husband

Who will instead escort her to the

Field of folded flags and silent white crosses

Where soldiers sleep

In a nursery of soil

And wait to be remembered

Like her fellow Sargeant who wrote on Facebook that

Her car was still in the lot at her Marine Corp

Base in North Carolina.

He wrote:

“I drove it around the parking lot every once

In awhile to make sure that it would be good for when she 

came home.”

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