Normandy, France: July 2009...
A battlefield...D-Day...World War II...
it was part of my tour’s itinerary.
I didn’t choose it. I never would have chosen it.
I don’t choose war...
but it was part of the tour...and I had paid for it...
so I went.
It was our last stop before our northern destination Two...three...
maybe four o’clock in the afternoon...
row after row of tombstones...
filling acres of field...ending in a jagged line
facing the Ocean.
Toward its western edge...stood a single marble monument filled with ashes of the unknown...the unidentifiable.
Am sure somebody knew
who they were when they signed up...
or when they were told
they had to go for all those reasons.
Walking among/between the graves...
careful not to step on any.
So many men’s names.
Don’t know if there’s a woman there.
Most died the first day they arrived...June 6, 1944.
I was in nursery school then...
San Francisco...there were air-raids...
we all wore identification tags. Down the hill
from where we lived...you could see the docks.
I remember the gray ships there...one behind the other...two, three, four rows of them...waiting in fog...smelled like this place.
This place... so quiet...always...after death it is so quiet. Back then,
what did it look like?
I imagine black and white newsreel film clips.
(Theaters always ran them before the main feature.)
What must the sounds have been?
History tells us...World War II was a necessary war.
We were attacked.
Fascism had to be stopped.
Hitler had to be stopped.
Sometimes we must fight back.
Sometimes we must stand up to what is happening to us...otherwise we are dead
anyway. French, Irish, Chippewa...all these parts of me know this...but I also know...
always...in the end...there is only death...and silence.
That part is forever the same.
All those tombstones...all l those lost lives...I wonder what this world
would have been if they had lived? Would you exist? Would I exist?
Perhaps...we would have all become someone else...
toss the dice.
What would this history we are living now have been if they had lived?
So many questions...so many unending...accumulating...questions. -
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