The Unharmed

November 11, 2000

War has a long wake. Waves of two long wars

washed us up slapped and gasping, upside down,

into our here and now:

their storm-swell, slow subsiding,

our cradle rocking. What could we know

of what it smashed before?

Cushioned upon its gentled lap and slap

we doze awake, ride high and dry

the caulked cocoons of our unearned lives.

We are the generation spared,

bubbles of a rolling boil

whose heat we never felt,

coddled and cossetted and silver-spooned,

unmindful of our luck-to have been dealt

so charmed a hand, in an unforgiving world!

-So we stand, the unharmed,

mute by the cenotaph,

reading the names of some who died.

We are the message in the bottle

bobbing unopened on the ebbing tide:

a cipher on a slip

of paper curled

around the Reason Why.

We are the writing that stayed dry,

and cannot read itself.

For Dr. F. W. Lundell (d. March 5, 2001)