Bones (How Things Stand)

29 October 2023

Someone must put into words how things stand,
not to silence the critics or win some shallow victory,
but only to make ourselves clear -- who we are
and why -- because when we are gone, there must be
some memento. Our children deserve that much, and more,
and although we are sure that we know what we know,
they will doubt it, so someone must put into words
how things stand, for they do stand, by miracle, time after time.

--

Or is the miracle within us after all?
These are difficult questions, but good ones.
One wonders whether in the final analysis
the children's children will look on their grandparents
with pity, as toward a girl who has had an abusive father
who fears that all men are abusive. Is all government
bloodthirsty? Or have we just deep collective wounds
from some prior injustices, burned in our memories? Caligula,
what a monster, and don't forget Nero, and of course
there were Hitler and Stalin...

At some point the prophecy fulfills itself.
We get more of the things we attend to.
The war against tyranny ensures more tyranny.
Whence comes the miracle?

From somewhere within, or maybe somewhere without,
but its origin means less than its presence.
It comes.

--

Virtue comes and goes, there's a new thought,
and whether you think it or not, it occurs,
the proverbial tree in the forest that makes a sound,
though the sound is ourselves, though nobody has ears to hear it.
It's what they call Spirit, although it is also
much more than that. It may live in our bones
and our ancestors' bones, and whatever their phobias,
whatever their misguided fancies, those phobias
guide us as instinct and intuition, the memory
of thousands of years of trial and error
with occasional insight, recorded through joy and through exaltation
in the bodies of those who live through it.

Why do we show such respect for old bones
if it's not because bones house the past,
and deep down we suspect that our present
will one day in total be bones?
Could it be that things stand on their bones,
that the boneless are formless, sans history,
without any direction or purpose?