The Rooster and the Race

The rooster crowed thrice
and I remembered...

I should have run
I should have run the race
I should have run to win
I knew about the race
I knew I was in it
I knew about the prize
But somewhere
Between

Ready...

Set...

And go.

I forgot the finish

I forgot the line
Between racing and ran
Between the race and what's after
I somehow forgot the purpose of it all

And the rooster crowed thrice.

Shadows Lit and Fled

The shadows lit and fled within the cave-

The hole of past iniquities piled high

And packed closer than stacked Parisian ’combs

Of bones on bones; mixed neighbours friends and foes

Till numbers disappear with all the names.

Yet when the crack of earthquake, pain and trial

Broke through the granite roof of strong facades

And split the cave in two down to the roots

The sunlight shone on bones in milling piles

Where darkness once held uncontested sway.

And in those dry and dusty bones within

That cold Platonic cave new life begins

To spark a fire in marrow stiff and old.

Life from death; a life renewed as phoenix

Wings and lasting beneath the phoenix star.

For now a valley is where once a cave

Held its crowded prisoners beneath dark,

Heavy earth and rock to dry out and wait

For what they did not know. These bones they have

Memories but no knowledge and hoping

Not much for futures, they forgot the hopes

In pasts. Before the end they grew as they

Now appear: cynical and hard and lone.

They saw only I’s and me’s and not we’s

But each a king, each a queen in their own

Reckoning, till parched and lost they became

All indistinguishable pale, dry bones.

The names and titles and wealth and everything

They once were and thought and fought over was

Forgotten; nameless heaps in an arid

Valley. There they should remain, forever,

A hidden mystery of death and woe.

Yet despite everything that lives and seems

And all that had ever lived a whisper,

A voice, a word arose beneath the sun

To light the still burning fire in these bones.

Forgotten, Forgotten, Forgotten

The air is dark with approaching death

And I hear it in the silence

Of forgetting and forgetting and forgetting

Wars, past and present.

Televisions and movie theatres

Add to the dull hum of silence

The sound we all make as we ignore

That which we thought we left behind.

It was not left to burn in fallen Troy

We did not leave it at Thermopylae

At Jerusalem’s gates

Or Rome’s hills.

We did not leave it in the dust of Carthage

At the yurt flaps of Khan

Or the bottom of The Channel

Gorged with the husks of ships

And the fragments of men.

We did not leave it on Abraham’s plains

The bloodthirsty dirt of Gettysburg

Or the long road back from Moscow.

We did not leave it at the door of the Bastille

The fields of Somme and Passchendaele

The skies over Britain

Or the waves in the harbor of pearls.

We did not leave it at Berlin’s feet

Or in the husks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It does not wander alone in Korea’s no man’s land

It does not lie dormant in the jungles of Vietnam

Or the killing fields of Cambodia

It is not broken as Yugoslavia

It has not sounded its death knell in Rwanda

It does not lie dead in the deserts of Iraq

Or exposed on the hills of Afghanistan

It is not gasping for breath in Sudan

Or falling into a coma in Somalia

It lives and breathes forgotten

Like a crawling parasite

Behind the eyes

Burdening the mind of humanity

We forget and forget and forget

That war is not left on the battlefield

War remains with us

And in us

War is in our souls