June’s Tune
June’s Tune
Holding Back The Years
June 8, 2022
The Days
You never joined the Army because you were afraid to die and you think often of the troops in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Other wars in desperate worlds. The young men and women who left home, took up a gun, and never came back.
They died young.
You are not young and have not been since long before the last war, before this war, the next war, the ever war.
Summer is not yet here and spring is still unfairly cold and you are not young anymore and the older you get, the more time you pass through, the more you think of the young and the dead.
The lost and the quiet.
The screaming truth of age.
America is dying because the young are dying. The greed is shameful and deadly. We send our children to school and they are murdered and it will not change until this country values the young, values the living, votes for real humans and remembers how young we once were.
“Half of this country is insane,” she whispers. “The other half is scared.”
She is tired of listening to me. She is young. When you squint. She is real. When you drink.
“All of this country is tired,” she says.
It’s a slow song she plays on her cassette player. A song from a young girl, who rides the ghost, who kisses the wave.
“It’s OK that you did not enlist in the Army,” she says as the song slithers about the night. “But it really is long past time that you join the war.”
The war, you say to yourself as she recedes. Her face fades, her smell dies, her song sighs.
The war, you say. The war. The war. The war. --TK
Wednesday, June 8, 2022