For I Once Saw You...
For I Once Saw You...
Yesterday
November 11, 2018
The 100
Only the statues remain.
The living men and women from World War One are all gone and have been for years.
Behind, they leave the granite, the marble, the stone and the emptiness of the days when the world crashed into itself for the first time and left the bodies of the young soldiers and the defenseless women and children behind.
The statues live everywhere. Hardened vestiges, they stand in the rain and snow enduring the years of Gatsby, Groucho, Hope, Elvis, Ringo, Rocky, Reagan, reboots, robots, randomness.
Acid rain and rude birds eat away at the statues of the dead but they don't yet crumble.
Fitzgerald wrote; "Good-bye, my father - good-bye, all my fathers."
The base of one statue of one soldier in one city under many skies says, perhaps in error,
If ye break faith with those who died
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
On Flanders fields.
The words were written on a piece of scrap paper by someone looking at the statue on a day of rain and cold before a long race and a night slept in a hotel that would not stand another two years before the attacks of another war that took us further from the time of Flanders Fields yet closer to its heart because its heart is hate and loneliness and moments lost in clouds and the clutter of minds that either forget the wars or never knew them.
The scrap of paper was tucked in a wallet and the scrap is now gone, fallen somewhere after a train ride or some other moment of failure, the many moments that the clock feeds on and carries into the vast hole that was supposed to be meaningful but is truly nothing more than the forgotten cough of a bug that lived and died on the same flower where it was born.
Only the statues still stand, doomed to someday topple and bleed back into the earth, the eyes that a sculptor cried through staring only into the dirt and the stone ears listening for the marching of soldiers and the terror of time. –TK
Sunday, November 11, 2018