"Like Swans on Still Water" ~Dusty

Like swans on still water they skim over the war
Ao dais gliding, rustling serenely
gleaming black hair pulled primly away
from faces that reveal nothing save inner repose,
a beauty so deep even war can't defile.

I note my reflection in their obsidian eyes--
an outsized barbarian, ungainly, unkempt,
baggy in ever-wilted greens,
five-pound boots taking plowhand strides,
face perpetually ruddy, dripping in alien heat.

In their delicate presence I exhume teenage failures--
the girl in the back row forever unnoticed,
the one no one ever invited to dance,
the one never voted most-likely anything,
the one who was never quite something enough.

But once in a while, on a crazy-shift morning,
when I've worked through the night and I'm too tired to care,
a young man who reeks of rice paddies lies waiting
for someone to heal the new hole in his life.
He says through his pain, all adolescent bravado, 
"Hey, what's your name?  Let's get married.  I love you."

And just for a moment I become Nefertiti
and for all the Orient's pearls and silks
I would not trade the glamour and privilege 
of these honored hands, licensed to touch 
one filthy GI.