I lived my life in nineteen forty-two, between the air-raids and the rations, waiting for when you returned and held me close, a forgotten thing, this and this and this a coming spring, a winter that rolled on with bangs and darkness and things unspoken because we carried a mask with which we suppressed our fears of the horror that was already crushing the lives of the ones we abandoned, forgotten, believed safe behind the script of hate which masqueraded as words of peace on sheets of paper which meant nothing more than the random lines etched onto a map in lieu of difference, the difference in our skin and blood and what we view as sacred by which I mean the holy land of our father, the precious soil of our mother, the ground in which the emperor grew to regal height and fell with each cherry blossom, an offering to the future that could not be redeemed by the booming generation which felt demeaned by what its forebears achieved in desperation, in necessity, and so turned and conquered with cold, hard, cash the things that once had been purchased by blood spattered in meaning, in trust, a hope of power that was merely lust, the stiffening which is the finality of middle age before it softens to detumescence and senescence and an ultimate decline to forgotten, like the sacrifices made, like the efforts given with no thought of reward, because this is what was done so that order was restored to our lives which we lived in fear of the nothing which I used to live with you, before nineteen forty-two.
Text by stuartcturnbull, picture by Inkflo vua Pixabay
I'm not sure where the inspiration for this came from, and I don't often manage stream-of-conscious style writing as I tend to need to hew words from granite and then work them into a usable form. Still, I was quite pleased with the overall form of this