The Burden of the Bearded Men

They moved like slow rivers across  

the land, their faces tangled with shadow  

and dust. Beards grew like the roots of  

trees, rough, unyielding, under the weight  

of days. Their knapsacks pulled down  

their backs, like mountains leaning toward  

the earth, heavy with unsung stories.  

In the journal, she wrote of their  

hands, calloused, smelling of iron,  

of how their eyes carried the distance  

of fields left behind. She said the sky  

seemed to fold over them like a tired  

blanket, wrapping their tired bodies.  

They marched through the bones  

of silence, past the forests that remembered  

other wars, their feet grinding the earth  

into dust, into memory. Each step was  

a letter unsent, a song caught between  

the wind and their breath.  

When the sun rose, it weighed  

on their shoulders like a command,  

and their beards grew longer, the trees  

seemed to whisper their names, roots  

entwined with their slow, measured  

hearts, their heavy knapsacks.