Emery L. Campbell is an award-winning writer of poetry and short works of fiction and nonfiction. Multicultural Books, a Canadian press, published a book of a selection of his poems and translations from the French of poetry by classical French poets in May 2005. The volume, titled This Gardener’s Impossible Dream: A Not So Green Thumb (or Why I Took Up Poetry Instead., was nominated for the 2006 Georgia Author of the Year Award, and a poem chosen from it received a nomination for a Pushcart prize.
Come look, try not to cringe, to weep to know
that all good sense is lost in flames of war.
Our men--just boys--have learned too young to sow
the seeds of death on fields once sere where gore
How bitter-sweet it is, through winter's numbing nights,
to listen as the dancing, smoky fire evokes
a vision from the distant past whose muted flights
ascend through swirling fog on tolling vesper's strokes.
A squad of US soldiers on patrol
at night along a roadway in Iraq
met evidence of wartime’s gruesome toll:
a mangled corpse that gave them all a shock.