This was my uncle of the war

all those years after Vimy Ridge
after Amiens and Passchendaele
and all the other hellish places
where by rights he should have died
with his comrades
of the Fighting Twenty-Fifth
L Cpl Harry Lee Blaikie
of Truro, Nova Scotia

sitting in a suit on Sunday afternoons
in our living room
when church was done
legs crossed, tie clip rising and falling
with each shallow breath
of the White Owl cigar
that burned oh so slowly
in his veined right hand
the smoke as low as his voice

talking with my father
of the car and lumber business
of the garage and mill and stock market
and the weather, always the weather
when all else failed, as if that alone
could affirm the bond between them
a code for everything left unspoken
how hot it was, how cold
minds me of the time in Burnside
those winters in the woods
the two of them turning in unison
to stare at the pale curtain window

my mother serving tea
and sweets
on good china plates
with pleasantries
and never a word of the war
on any occasion in all those years
not even second hand from my father
and thus I knew my uncle not
but a quiet man with a burning cigar
pale eyes beneath dark glasses
good felt hats and pastel cars
and it was not until he was very old

and near death himself
that he finally spoke – to the newspaper – 
of the gas and mud and shells
and machine gun bullets
and the stench of the trenches
horrors that even then he could
scarcely bring himself to mention
You did what you had to do
he said, I shot at people

my uncle, leaving as arrived
a shadow at the close of day
backing out the laneway into the dusk
gone like the wars we never knew

(From: In That Old City by the Sea, by David Blaikie. 2017

Note: Memories of an uncle, Harry Lee Blaikie (1897-1988), who was there, and survived, but spent the rest of his life with what might now be diagnosed as a form of PTSD. I don't recall him ever mentioning his service overseas in all the times he came to our house in Nova Scotia.