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 GoetheWhen 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.
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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