WILL YOU STILL GRIEVE FOR US?
by Frances Spencer

Armageddon 2001.

Can you hear me?
I am one of hundreds who died
that infamous day in September
when everyday life exploded into terror,
flames roared upward to meet the clouds,
and skyscrapers melted down
upon the darkened and desolate streets
of a wounded city.
I was attacked by madmen
quoting pollitics to justify my murder.
Yet, I crawled through fire and smoke
and gave my life without a qualm
trying to save a stranger.
When ten more Septembers have passed,
will you remember my sacrifice
and will you still grieve for me?

The Endless Wars.

We are the heroes in blue coats
who died at Appomatox for the cause of liberty.
Skin color no longer mattered,
black, white and brown,
we fought and fell together.
Our blood mingled in the killing fields
of Virginia and Pennsylvania
so that slavery might be abolished
and all men might be free.

We are the tip of the iceeberg,
a few among the millions who died in all the wars.
We are the nameless soldiers whose bodies can’t be found,
the lovers who never married,
the innocent children who never grew up.
We are the victims of hatred,
----- of vengeance,
----------of greed.

We sacrificed our lives so that y ou might learn
the futility of killing and the insanity of war.
Was it all for nothing that we died?
When twenty more Septembers have passed,
will you kneel beside the fading crosses
on grass watered by our blood
and will you grieve for us?

The Question.

We are the rulers of once-great cities
that are no more than shards of clay,
fallen stones grown over with moss
and rubble buried
beneath the shifting sands of time.
All that remain are crumbling palaces,
dusty pyramids, marble statues with broken arms
and hieroglyphs of long forgotten languages.

You have built new cities on the buried ruins.
You are English, Mexican, Africaan, Chinese,
Vietnamese, Persian, Japanese, Koreaan,
Greek, Italian, Palestinian, Jew.
You are many cultures, many races, many beliefs.
You are the victors and the vanquished,
the brave and the meek,
the victims and the violators,
the kind and the cruel,
defenders and conquerors,
creators and destroyers,
masters and slaves.

We have been together, all of us,
since the first night we sat around a fire
and shared our stories, songs and prophecies.
We are suffering humanity.
We wander on crooked paths
and stumble across the broken stones of antiquity,
crying out in desperation, “Why?”

The Future.

We belong together,
the living and the dead.
We are like the threads of a fine cloth,
with warp and weft so tightly interwoven
that it can’t be pulled apart by ordinary means.
It took us a million years
to weave the cloth of civilization.
On its surface we can see
the beauty and splendor of our future.
But there is a terrible disease
eating away the glowing threads.
It’s the virus of hate,
of vengeance,
of war
that festers inside
and waits for the worms to arrive
and finish the job.
When twenty Septembers have passed,
will the tapestry of life shine brightly
in the sun, or (even though you grieve for us)
---- will the threads unravel
---------and crumble into dust?

Finale.

It’s up to y ou now.
You are the living.
We are the legions who sacrificed our lives
to show you the way to peace.
We have learned from the past, and
at last we understand.
Now, all we can do is wait and see
whether there will be a world tomorrow
for us to come back to.

Our last hope lies in you.
Each of you is a nation, a kingdom, a world.
You have your own loves, your hates, your jealousies,
your greed, your desire for vengeance.
You are a only a piece of the whole,
and yet you are the whole.
You reflect the world,
just as each shard of a broken mirror
reflects the same image as all the other shards,
and each the same as the mirror when it was whole.

We have done all we can do.
It’s your turn now.
If you don’t act soon,
the shattered pieces will lie where they are,
---broken and silent
----------for all eternity.


Frances Spencer
Copyright 9/11/02