Story [1923: Yellowstone] Grey: A Poem of Spencer Dutton

A/N: Though only on episode of 1923 has aired, I was struck by the trouble WWI veteran Spencer Dutton. He suffers from PTSD and is running from returning home to the Yellowstone Ranch in Montana.

Grey: A Poem of Spencer Dutton

Cloudy skies blend into wet, grey mud
As blood erupts from ashy uniforms
Coming at me through lifeless, leafless trees.

My hands are frozen- no welded - to the handles and trigger of the machine gun
That is both a dealer of death and my only lifeline.
Men fall like timber in front of me,
The sound of my firing obscuring the smack of their dive into the wet earth.

My ears do not hear the change
As I fire empty rounds and see men passing me by on the either side.
Do they notice me? Will they, if I stay still?

These men are not deer or bison.
They do not sustain the body with their meat.
The reason for war may seem just,
But senseless slaughter does not agree with my heart.

How do I go on slaughtering?
How do I make so many deaths, at my own hand, as valuable as those life-giving animals?
There is no way to escape the carnage.
It coats my eyes in the hours I am awake
And follows me like a wolf into sleep.

There is no safe place.
Yellowstone is home, but
Home is as perilous as the battlefield.
The Serengeti is only a slight balm
As the hunt quiets my demons for a time.

 

Good to see you writing again!

I haven't watched Yellowstone (although I've heard a lot of good things about it!) but this is an incredible poem. The imagery is very winter-y and bleak and really captures what he's going through.

I could quote the whole thing, but these lines really stood out:

Just really powerful writing, and an extra round of applause for the poetry! Amazing work.

 

Upon reading about the show, what a cast! I liked how you wrote about the different sorts of wildness and wilderness, Montana and the Serengeti, one "grey" and the other just as bleak, but in "beige", *I suppose, never having visited the Serengeti.*

 

Brilliantly evocative! I love reading books featuring the gorgeous landscapes such as Yellowstone and the amazing redwoods of California. So it is very heart wrenching that something that should be a source of healing and respite is instead tied to something horrific.