Remembrance Day is coming. I will remember.
Almost Today I almost wept today. I almost wept for distant, unknown siblings who packed up most of what they needed, entrusting it to new brothers and sisters in filthy tent spaces in places where God shone first. I almost wept because I forget that there are kindred, heartbroken souls who picked up swords, shields, pens and went to war. They bruised themselves to pay back what they had not yet earned, and cast down lots to see which brother would deliver the news to which mother, father, uncle, son. Life, they said, is bigger than a sum of actions. Freedom, they yelled, as they signed on lines and razored young hair, is more than expecting others to give when all that gets done is taking. You, they screamed, mean more to me than I mean to myself. That we can love and hate and fear each other as much or as little as we want or desire or crave or stand isn’t a right – it’s a privilege won by those who guard my shores even though I didn’t ask, and keep safe every delicate mote of an existence I can’t live without yet often can’t explain. So why do they stand in places where steel rain brings agony and the sun makes dust that cannot bind wounds? Why do they stand on lines and make war, humanity’s true negotiation, when all I do is stare, lost, at numbers and figures and soft gentle things and wonder where everything went wrong when it isn’t going wrong at all. It’s right, but only because they refuse to let it be wrong, although I, bathed in choice, try to make it so. It’s right because their blood, leaking into soil and paddy and ground and sand and jungle and hedgerow and ocean and beach and bamboo prison cage is the guilty fuel I fill my tank with. I might want to weep, yet I brush away any tear that might be seen by anyone, not the least of whom whose sacrifice reminds me that I didn’t get here by myself. You brought me here. You wept on ground not yet given a name and jagged wire not yet holy – you bled tears and gore and ragged, unheard last breaths and said that I could work this piece of ground, if only to borrow it awhile from those for whom I’d not yet wept.
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