in remembrance
I'd say I don't know where this came from, only I do (so what I really mean is that I'm not entirely sure why I'm posting it). This is me on memories of my life in Poland and too much Miłosz & Herbert (and perpetually on bits of Eliot). This is the bit of me nurtured by my career-Army uncle -- the bit that, in spite of my somewhat pacifistic tendencies, has the utmost respect for anyone who's ever worn a military uniform. (And this is me plagiarising military hymns, abusing wordplay and allusion, and referencing a lot of things I probably don't deserve to, as well as a lot of things that very probably only make sense to myself.)
But this is for everyone we honour on November 11 (or the day after, as the case may be). This is for the men and women I don't remember or think on often enough.
Most of all, this is for Caban and Magik.
There are wild blue yonders and restless waves and free lands. There are climes and places where freedom is fought for and born: deserts filled with someones everyone knows, oceans that hold a larger amount of secrets and love and life than could suit any cliche, jungles littered with bits and pieces of the beggars passed on city streets and the parents we don't ask questions of, and mountains blanketed by bullets from guns that strap little children to themselves.
And there are months crueller than April, when soldiers come in a family unit, and they fall: father, then mother, and on it goes, one by one and too young.
On a rebuilt street there are black-and-white memory-painted scenes of torture and destruction and faded walls that a boy who escaped them can never forget. In a forest the same boy will always be running from the nightmares of capture by an enemy, dogs at his heels, branches slapping against his face. He runs, on and on, left behind and sent away by those who escaped the noose that made him a man before he had lived out little more than decade. He slips over the enemy's borders and onto their trains and uses their language against them, and he carries with him always the memory of a father who helped rebuild a nation and a mother taken to her death by the conductors of trains like the ones he's hiding upon, returning to a sister whom even magic cannot protect indefinitely.
An old man tends his garden, and a woman nearby binds together straw and garments in an imitation of being that everyone pretends is only an accurate enough representation of self to frighten winged scavengers. The world ends elsewhere: in cities where Diana carries a radio instead of a bow (and transmits encoded messages as she crouches in the forest of barricades that become her grave), in front of a now-standing castle where a unit of Davids fights a different kind of Goliath (but triumph all the same), in trenches and sewers and foxholes stained with blood that can't be swallowed (and lined with the lives of those whom willpower isn't enough to save).
And everywhere is filled with ghosts, lost in a blackness known only by those like the boy who lost half his sight so whole worlds could be preserved (though they weren't, always: and mostly, everyone forgets).
But this is for everyone we honour on November 11 (or the day after, as the case may be). This is for the men and women I don't remember or think on often enough.
Most of all, this is for Caban and Magik.
There are wild blue yonders and restless waves and free lands. There are climes and places where freedom is fought for and born: deserts filled with someones everyone knows, oceans that hold a larger amount of secrets and love and life than could suit any cliche, jungles littered with bits and pieces of the beggars passed on city streets and the parents we don't ask questions of, and mountains blanketed by bullets from guns that strap little children to themselves.
And there are months crueller than April, when soldiers come in a family unit, and they fall: father, then mother, and on it goes, one by one and too young.
On a rebuilt street there are black-and-white memory-painted scenes of torture and destruction and faded walls that a boy who escaped them can never forget. In a forest the same boy will always be running from the nightmares of capture by an enemy, dogs at his heels, branches slapping against his face. He runs, on and on, left behind and sent away by those who escaped the noose that made him a man before he had lived out little more than decade. He slips over the enemy's borders and onto their trains and uses their language against them, and he carries with him always the memory of a father who helped rebuild a nation and a mother taken to her death by the conductors of trains like the ones he's hiding upon, returning to a sister whom even magic cannot protect indefinitely.
An old man tends his garden, and a woman nearby binds together straw and garments in an imitation of being that everyone pretends is only an accurate enough representation of self to frighten winged scavengers. The world ends elsewhere: in cities where Diana carries a radio instead of a bow (and transmits encoded messages as she crouches in the forest of barricades that become her grave), in front of a now-standing castle where a unit of Davids fights a different kind of Goliath (but triumph all the same), in trenches and sewers and foxholes stained with blood that can't be swallowed (and lined with the lives of those whom willpower isn't enough to save).
And everywhere is filled with ghosts, lost in a blackness known only by those like the boy who lost half his sight so whole worlds could be preserved (though they weren't, always: and mostly, everyone forgets).