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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 16: MOTHERS OF SOLDIERS
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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

MOTHERS OF SOLDIERS

What should we say to you, O glorious Mothers
Sacred and full of sorrows, we childless ones?
We kneel to you as haloed women, we others,
The slighter lives that could not give their sons.
Not ours the exquisite anguish of surrender,
The deep, still courage that day by day endures,
The rosary of memories piercing-tender,
The travail and the triumph that are yours.
The agony and the glory of creation
You have partaken; in that steep way you trod
You have made yourselves part of the world’s salvation,
You have shared the passion and the joy of God.
With splendor of sunrise and the surging morn,
Out of your pain shall Man be newly born.