A River Wide And Deep
By Tom Brosman
In shirts of blue in the dark of night
They roll to wrecks and danger
Before the aid car arrives on scene
They comfort injured strangers
Troopers are the idol of children who dream
Of one day driving a white troop car
Kids want to be like the troop with a car so white it gleams
But how things look in life is not the way things are
A trooper rolls to things that most never want to see
It’s a blue shirt first at every crash and every kind of scene
It’s the broken glass and crumpled metal and bad fatalities
And a uniform dirty and wet, far far from clean.
A trooper with a few years on
Has seen the best and the worst in people
And the number of friends the trooper trusts
Dwindles down to digits single.
Oh, lots of people talk and brag
That they are going to become a trooper
But when the chance is on the table,
They choose to be a plumber.
There are a few, a vital few,
Who wear the badge and live the life.
Who work the nights and weekends too
And don’t complain though the cost is high.
There are those that talk and those that do
A river is wide and deep between the two.
Lots of troopers pay the price
And proudly wear the shirt of blue.
