Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
By our losses we learn strength,
Unless these pains be chronic and
Long-time enduring, in which case
We may suffer more pains unspoken
Than are visibly known. Beneath
These savage, rimy stars where
White smoke seethes and river mist
Drifts across these fallen dead, we
Fortunate ones look forward to decades
Undreamt, when the inconsolable
Differences dividing our children
And their descendants are trivial and
Mean. Around the campfires in the
Morning drinking coffee, bitter and
Thin, listening to ghostly voices
On the wind, we stow our gear,
Departing, to start it all again.
It started out a little on the indoctrinating side but swerved into the poetics quick enough and the end justifies the beginning, so to speak, by drawing the reader's attention to an ambiguous and interpretative world-space setting with characters, troubles and double-meanings. Interesting imagery. The river mist recalls the river of life and one immediately envisages the countless generations arisen and fallen since the dawn of human kind and the painful lesson of the history drawn by the present one that we are very likely to share the fate of the fallen soldiers we hear, read and talk about and who, in the retrospect magic of time sands, are transformed into heroes and villains, mythical figures that inhabit our fairy-land realm of massive culture which is quite often almost utterly removed from the main body of what we hopefully call 'the reality'. But there's hope, hope is in the survival mechanisms of our brain and soul. Hope equals life, life requires hope in the longer run and these two seem entirely inseparable cogwheels in a grand and complicated (and consequently flawed) machinery. Move out and march on indeed and regiments are the only way to go, I think. Lonely wolves can do so little nowadays. Indeed, on the speculative abstract level, it may be that lone wolves are in fact an impossible concept in sheer conflict with the actual laws of this world but that's just a theory...
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