One Year Out

Image of Untitled (Seascape) pencil drawing by patent attorney and artist Howard Russell Butler (1856-1934), courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

This is how it ends for him:
no funeral, no battle hymn,
just water absorbed into the lungs,
dragging him into an ice-cold tomb,

limitless gallons of titanic weight,
crushing breath with fists of fate.
One year out
is met with doom.

Stern sinks in eight, but he goes longer,
combating the chill of terror-water.
He shoulders through a mass of waves,
through gulps of salty-death to save
as many hearts and hands, he sees-
as many cries as he perceives.
One year out
is all God gives.

Numb his lips, and all tread ceases;
his limbs immobile, his mind releases
the sounds of an Alabama summer:
songbirds, fishing lines, the voice of his mother.
He wills death away to save more men yet,
Temporary is the swim; infinite is the depth.
One year out
is all he gets.

One Year Out, a poem in remembrance of Lieutenant Stanton F. Kalk, United States Navy, was first published by Southern Arizona Press in its anthology, The Poppy: A Symbol of Remembrance, September 2022.

Stanton F. Kalk (1894-1917), Lieutenant (Junior Grade), United States Navy, graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1916. He was killed in action the following year, when a German submarine fired a torpedo that struck the USS Jacob Jones on which Kalk was on board, sinking the American destroyer. Kalk survived the blast and heroically swam from raft to raft moving survivors in an effort to save them by equalizing the weight of the life rafts. In doing so, Kalk died of exhaustion and exposure. Kalk was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. [Historical Source: Naval History and Heritage Command site, www.history.navy.mil.]

One Year Out, Copyright © 2022 by Donna Kathryn Kelly