Poor red-shirted brutes—

to wake and find

their trumpets muffled,

decoys turned flesh and fled,

campsites cold, and that old

turncoat, their own ravenous

marrow now yearning humbly

to serve as worm-bait.

What paradise composes itself

out of the pitch dark of death

for them?  A skyline of drenched,

rustling pines might please.

But they can’t stomp around

with a family of bloody rabbits

dangling from their belts

by the hind legs anymore.

Will these men lie in warm heaps

on God’s lap awhile

when they first arrive,

wide-eyed, panting,

being petted and spoken to gently

in a tongue they do not know,

while their soft-mouthed

dogs, now winged, circle overhead,

like slobbering helicopters?

Armed for eternity with only

their love of faint roads,

of tramping through honeysuckle

and butterweed, how will they pass

the time?  The dead hunters

glug black coffee from a vacuum

bottle and watch dawn explode

into a mass of orange and red feathers

every morning, and the force

of that report knocks them

right off their feet.