Commemoration Hour
A moth-cupped flame sputtersout of silence in my kitchen, draws insectswhining through the window's crack.They sing like distant bi-planes,dogfight-dancing at the edge of sight.I watch red wax spillover the candle's battered lipand think of family, long dead,the quiet men on unquiet frontswho let the rituals of their religionslide away, buoyed upon propaganda, desperation, hunger,as they wrote loving letters in the darksuccoured only by a single flame,by the guttering distances of home.Oh, how they dreamed of family,gave thanks to G-d for the minuscule merciesof the weekly post (when it got through)but even the gentlest man will break insidewhen bombs and snipers dictate their diet,when all the animals of hellcome crawling out from under mudon sinews of metal clasping at the bone.*What precisely did they die for,or limp home wounded with?My grandfather never said, sitting in silence,with his memories, in the garden of his weekend homeuntil he was forced to cross Germany's bordersand escape into England two decades on.Great Uncle Martin could not say.Splintered in 1915 by enemy fire, only his letters remainregaling his dearest sister Röeschenwith brotherly bravado, detailing requestsfor the essentials: paper, food and pens;whatever news might make it through the lines from home.*The candle's spitting out its lastone hundred years onbut still the news is limited and grim.The insect whine of war continues.Tanks rumble through my kitchenwhenever the fridge fires up.Commemoration wears an ugly, celebratory mask.Its eyeholes stare us down like gunsand from its mouth a fine gas seeps.'Gas! Quick, boys.' An ecstasy of fumblingin the press for ways to not quite say"We won, we won, we won!"But we won nothing. The war continuesin fragments, though no one is yetcrazed enough to join the dots,and all I can see in this quiet houris red wax stiffening on the candleinto the faces of all the people that I love.
Written in haste under the light of a single candle.
