So I am going out on a limb here – it’s skinny, shaky, could break any minute. Well, let me back up and give you the impetus for my venture before I describe this particular limb. My mother’s cousin and her hubs are visiting at the moment and she is a card-carrying member of the race that knows Joseph. She is also a writer and we have had numerous conversations on the topic-a topic that has been percolating since I started this blog. I am enjoying this blog hugely (although truth be told it does feel a little indulgent) and I am remembering how much I LOVE to put words together, and the release I get from writing. The remembrance is drawing me ever so gently back to the idea of writing poetry. Yes, I sporadically write poetry, but it paralyzes me to think about other people reading it. The last thing I want is someone going all Judgy McJudgerson on something so intensely personal. But I think maybe, just maybe, I might be letting a little bit of that go. So I’m knock-kneed, scared to death, white knuckled on this skinny limb . . . I am going to post a poem, and here is why.

A REACTION TO THE EVENTS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

Phantoms of the future

Are haunting my present.

Unyielding tormentors

Of days not spent.

A nightmarish landscape

Of fear mixed with pride-

A cluttered graveyard

Where dreams have died.

Bodies are bathed with rhetoric

“Freedom is never free.”

Sons are sacrificed for mothers,

Our debt to goddess Liberty.

Amid the eerie corpses

Clouding visions of what may be,

A relentless question echoes-

“What becomes the price for me?”

When I count the cost, for me and for the ones I love, when my future ghosts are now littering my past, when I scroll my FB page and probably half of my friends are posting names of friends and family that have died, it’s, I don’t know, overwhelming? Emotional? I can’t even find a word. Not pointless, but there is an element of searching for reason.

What flows from this thought process is my second point and (thankfully) provides me with some perspective, or at least a moment where I step outside myself. Memorial Day for many of us is intensely personal and in our blindness and grief we miss the family who still wonders in what square mile of jungle their son is resting. Or we forget about the number of unidentified soldiers resting on Omaha Beach, or in a graveyard in Flanders. In this century alone, consider the 4000+ in this war, 58,000 and change in Vietnam, over 500,000 from the two World Wars, and countless others in unnamed, unremembered conflicts. The scale of grief, sacrifice, and courage it represents is heart-wrenching and soul-sustaining in the same aching moment. (I would say forgive the hyperbole, but I don’t feel like I am exaggerating, there just aren’t enough adequate words . . . ).

It does make the barbeques seem a wee bit insufficient, no? All that to say—Original J.—I miss you.

~M.

P.S. Bring them home.