I woke to the sound of rain, to grey sky. The house was quiet of all but steady drizzle. I made coffee, pulled my robe tight and sat before the small table in the kitchen. His notes and my cup my company.
His journal was then, as it is now, yellowed of page, his blood, the darkness of it, even then, fading. I turned the pages. Traced my finger over his graceful lines. Raised the notebook and breathed in all of France, all of war, all of what had taken my soul to heights and depths that made the rising sun nothing but an annoyance.
But I could not not turn the pages. My coffee grew cold. I drank it anyway. The rain continued to fall and I thought of mud, of slush, of the color of young blood mixing in foreign muck, of his blood upon my hands, of my thumb making the sign of the cross on his forehead, his cistern eyes growing still, the tension in his neck released.
I thought now of what I knew, of what his mother didn’t, of her grief and my obligation. I thought too of the burden of my own weakness and I heard the voices of doubt as I had heard the chorus a few days before, those voices rising into the dark of wooden beams above wooden pews. And still it rained. Not hard. Not in anger, but softly. Relentlessly. And what rained was within as without and as my sight from table to field was not clear, so too, nothing else.
Those days have not grown as so many others. Some root remains barren and bitter, producing no flower, nothing green, nothing of life. Nor do I know the way of releasing, of pruning as so many others have learned. So this burden, so heavy, I decided, I would carry alone. I could not then, nor can I now, envision the benefit of sharing, of sharing what I knew was, without embellishment, a needless death, of a boy alone, dying not in the hands that bore him, hands I would see but never hold.
2 comments:
And still it rained. Not hard. Not in anger, but softly. How I love that.
This post made me think of literature textbooks, of chapters dedicated to various aspects of writing and examples within chosen because they embody the theme of that particular chapter. Your writing has always been a combination of the best parts of everything. Expressiveness and atmosphere, to name but two aspects, from here to eternity within every sentence, every paragraph. Emotion that turns the reader inside out. Every moment cherished.
Well, all I know is this. Your comments over the last five years have watered the root of my writing. What is seen today, is seen as much by your hand as mine. And still, the thrill of reading one of your comments remains; and, like sunrise, never grows old. As always, thank you for what you give. It may be unseen but never unfelt by a heart that longs to be held, and apparently, heard.
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