Memorial Day

Please read “In Memoriam” (by Cate Terwilliger of Meditatio Ephemera) below. Thank you, Cate, for your reverence, empathy, aplomb, and leadership in memorializing our fellow citizens who “let their lives — and deaths — speak” for the imperative of peace.

Concerning the Delay of My Self-Immolation

“I know nothing poorer
Under the sun than you gods!” ~ J. W. von Goethe

When i sacrifice myself
as a gift to my fellow humans,
i promise it will be for nothing
so hackneyed as to protest
some hypoxic septuagenarian
hunched on a mountaintop,
mistaking every tendril
to wisp from his head
for a well-honed lightning bolt…

Not that i imagine
there’s any portion of my no-longer-
combustible flesh i might set
upon the balance that could be
tendered for passage to Elysium—

but you can believe i’d pluck my own eyes
from their sockets, send the fabrics
from my padded scaffold back to China
& traipse forever, a blind,
naked-as-a-mole-rat gnome in the garden
of unscented flowers, if the stygian prophecies
were to divine any semblance of purpose
in chaining my corpse to the cliff face…

& though these desiccating seasons
have yet to assemble
me into fuel for Helios’ pyre,
if ever my splitting spurs should cease
to cry out dragon’s blood,

i will blaze
with the ire of a rebel Titan;

my ashes will salt the gods’ tears
lapping the west’s black edge…

~ STEPHANIE L. HARPER

“Concerning the Delay of My Self-Immolation” first appeared in the January 2019 issue of *Ristau: A Journal of Being*, edited by poet and human of excellence, Bob Penick.

Meditatio Ephemera

They were names I didn’t recognize, names I’d never heard: Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, George Winne, Jr. Five Americans who, between 1965 and 1970, publicly self-immolated — set themselves fatally afire — to protest the Vietnam War.

I am thinking of them on Memorial Day, when we traditionally commemorate Americans who gave their lives in the cause of war. I am thinking of them because we don’t dedicate a day to Americans who gave their lives in the cause of peace.

Thousands protested to end our involvement in Vietnam, the most divisive war the United States has ever fought apart from the Civil War a hundred years earlier that nearly tore it asunder. Best estimates put civilian casualties during what Americans officially call the Vietnam “conflict” (and Vietnamese call the American War) at up to 50 percent of the total — approximately 1.3 million to more than 3 million people.

Many of those…

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There is This

Portland, OR: May 27, 2017

On a trellis erected between
my west suburb neighborhood
& the nearest MAX station
the wisteria vines burgeon
overhead in a dusky-purple
cascade like a dessert wine
but yesterday     while I was
out walking as the early evening
heat broke     I noticed a sallow carpet
of petals    fallen
in their waning since just
the previous day     was now
ensconcing the concrete     & already
bearing the heavy imprints—illumined
by the sun’s oblique indifference—
of commuters’ footfalls
& the tell-tale     parallel furrows
of hipsters on skateboards

I saw black sugar ants scavenging
the secretions of the barely-dead
& felt a sour twist of grief
over that chapter unfolding underfoot
of the inevitability I understand
to be inherent in all that is
as dictated by the rule of reason
which in turn instructs
the Hawkmoth’s impassioned
twilit plummets into a streetlamp’s halo—
the Death’s-Head’s testament to the light
by which darkness must be defined

I’ll admit to being fickle—a variable
ally of predators & prey alike—
as I’m no less liable to marvel
at the grit of a barn cat stalking a fat vole
(& then to cheer at the rodent’s brief death-throes squeak!)
than I am to release a breathless prayer into the wind
for a crab scuttling frantically ocean-ward
in the shadow of a whimbrel

Steely prudence requires
our acceptance of tragic ends for some
as they are said to ensure the greater
endurance of the whole & all of us know—
having learned since earliest childhood
some version of the proverbial
to every thing there is a season
& a time to every purpose under heaven—
that the sun’s descent into the Pacific
beckons the moon’s rise to its vigil
that the ardent frog’s first chirps at dusk
will ring into a night of river-song
& that the raccoons’ kits will always
endure December’s snowfalls
cloistered in their hollows

But the lesson yesterday scrawled
on a sick-sweet banner of dying
wisteria unfurled over a city
I no longer recognize
is a new black codicil
rained down from the heavens
in which teenage girls are menaced
& the throats of their intercessors are slashed
during rush hour on a train

There is no season
no time
& no poem to assuage
such unnatural waning

There is only this
futile transit of hours
to successive hours—

this exodus
of blood from its native heart

STEPHANIE L. HARPER

MAX memorial

It’s been one year and one day since Taliesin Namkai-Meche and Ricky Best were murdered, and Micah Fletcher narrowly escaped with his life, on a MAX train in Portland, Oregon. Let Memorial Day be a day to revere their heroic stand against the vile inhumanity of racially-motivated hatred; and let us every day be a heart that remembers and strives to be worthy of their precious sacrifice.

“There is This” was first drafted during the May 2017 Tupelo Press 30/30 challenge, as I was grappling with my initial shock and grief upon first learning of this tragedy. It was subsequently published in the Fall 2017 edition of Harbinger Asylum, edited by Z. M. Wise.