Young Soldiers

You send your young soldiers to war,
To keep danger away from your door.
They fight the battles and shed the blood,
In foreign lands, far away from you.
They do the killing and dying…
That you don’t have the stomach to.
Then you repay them with disdain,
When they return back home again…
Their broken bodies filled with pain,
And refuse them care when they complain.
Then you wonder why they go insane…
When hope is something they can’t regain.
And when they self-destruct you say…
“I don’t know why it ended that way.”

© Mary Elizabeth Balderrama