Shorthink44

Now, I can’t see the aurora borealis because it is raining, but I have seen pictures of it from all over the world. Do you suppose that they can see the wild rose pink skies in the Ukraine? Where the bombs are? I do not know how it must feel to see the sky in the Ukraine when you are broken in the mud. Perhaps you see the pink in the puddles reflected and think that it is the blood of your comrades. Or the blood of history seeping out of the tortured soil. What do we know of beauty in the midst of war? Is there any? 

But that is not the way to think. We are to marvel and stand still in wonderment at the sky that sings fractured rainbow light to us. For just a bit of time we can think of lovely things like the wild rose quivering in the wind. Were we so imperfect that we lost paradise? Were we so foolish that we compartmentalized other’s pain and put them on a shelf to look at one day when we were told we could? But I am one who cannot seem to do that. 

I feel the pain of strangers like an aching fury in my bones, my old bones. Perhaps my bones are old because the pain of others has finally won. Perhaps my words are empty whispers at the edges of history, easily forgotten in the pageantry and pathos that is the human condition.

We were never really clever. We might have thought we were. But we weren’t. We know this because there is a soldier somewhere looking at a sky, just like we who are not soldiers are doing. Neither the soldier nor we are clever at all. We simply serve someone else’s cause. No matter what we do. 

But again, that is not a way to think. We must watch the shimmering that caresses the sky until it trembles with a passion we do not understand. We are only mortals given questions and no answers and that was our hell. That was our punishment. To never know why we are either the soldier or not the soldier under a wild rose sky. 

Peace. Here. Now.