Feb 2016
On the night of our attack we’re ordered to keep the fires damped. We huddle close to our horses and hum war lullabies under our breaths and the loudest sounds are the stars, creaking from their hooks.
We got the Speech that afternoon, when we’d rounded the valley and found the city resplendent and open and inviting in an overtly ****** way before us.
“Kids” we were told
“Tonight we are boys and girls for the last time. Tomorrow we will be dead and will have become new as warriors and fools. We will never be accountants. We will never be lawyers. We will never heal the sick unless with spit, and harsh words, and duck tape. We will never teach anything but strength through violence and stoicism. Philosophy to us is nothing but an action incomplete. Poetry will never move us – words will never have the beauty of the bottle, or the fist.”
Now hidden by the dark, I curl myself up in my hoodie and silently whisper to my mare. She’s oak brown and placid but for when we ride into battle, and then she is a battleaxe and has no fear, only forward, as if ‘into the black night’ are the only words she knows.
But she understands me when I look around our camp and into the shadowed faces of my compatriots who will not be here with me tomorrow, and those that remain will no longer be singing lullabies, of any kind.
Tomorrow we will fight, and account for our dead, even if we won’t write it down.
Tomorrow we will make our own laws, with swords and decision and violence that would only beget more violence and only leaves everything ******, scattered, alone.
Tomorrow we will ride into laughter and remind those who have forgotten that this is Chance, this is Life. That in itself is a lesson.
Tomorrow we will fight and die and be resurrected and in what manner that will happen will be a form of philosophy.
And when you slap me on the back and wipe away a drop of blood from my cheekbone and smile, saying ‘you done did good’, that will be like medicine to me, bitter.
Tomorrow we will ride into heaven and make bedlam out of it. That in itself is a kind of poetry.
And when I watch you walk away, the sway of your hips will also be poetry to me.
And if I find myself a bottle it will not be poetry, only a soliloquy, a lament for something lost.
And the plunder that we’ll have won from this? Well, that won’t be worth anything.
But I am that which would have the war wounds rather than the name of coward etched upon on my cheek.
And so I hum my last lullaby, and prepare for tomorrow.
We got the Speech that afternoon, when we’d rounded the valley and found the city resplendent and open and inviting in an overtly ****** way before us.
“Kids” we were told
“Tonight we are boys and girls for the last time. Tomorrow we will be dead and will have become new as warriors and fools. We will never be accountants. We will never be lawyers. We will never heal the sick unless with spit, and harsh words, and duck tape. We will never teach anything but strength through violence and stoicism. Philosophy to us is nothing but an action incomplete. Poetry will never move us – words will never have the beauty of the bottle, or the fist.”
Now hidden by the dark, I curl myself up in my hoodie and silently whisper to my mare. She’s oak brown and placid but for when we ride into battle, and then she is a battleaxe and has no fear, only forward, as if ‘into the black night’ are the only words she knows.
But she understands me when I look around our camp and into the shadowed faces of my compatriots who will not be here with me tomorrow, and those that remain will no longer be singing lullabies, of any kind.
Tomorrow we will fight, and account for our dead, even if we won’t write it down.
Tomorrow we will make our own laws, with swords and decision and violence that would only beget more violence and only leaves everything ******, scattered, alone.
Tomorrow we will ride into laughter and remind those who have forgotten that this is Chance, this is Life. That in itself is a lesson.
Tomorrow we will fight and die and be resurrected and in what manner that will happen will be a form of philosophy.
And when you slap me on the back and wipe away a drop of blood from my cheekbone and smile, saying ‘you done did good’, that will be like medicine to me, bitter.
Tomorrow we will ride into heaven and make bedlam out of it. That in itself is a kind of poetry.
And when I watch you walk away, the sway of your hips will also be poetry to me.
And if I find myself a bottle it will not be poetry, only a soliloquy, a lament for something lost.
And the plunder that we’ll have won from this? Well, that won’t be worth anything.
But I am that which would have the war wounds rather than the name of coward etched upon on my cheek.
And so I hum my last lullaby, and prepare for tomorrow.
