silver linings.
do not weep, young maiden, for war is kind.
war will have your son listed the moment he turns eighteen,
the minute society deems he turns from a boy to a man.
though you had known it had already begun long before that.
war will have your son drafted upon his first breath into this world,
the moment you take him into your arms for the first time
and knew that every moment after would be leading up to
the inevitable day you see him off to war.
war is a constant reminder of the impending day you send him off,
like a shadow looming tall, as you silently count down the days to
his eighteenth birthday with your fingers.
on his sixteenth birthday, he talks of great wars and noble soldiers
with a light in his eyes and you do nothing but feign a smile,
for you could not bring yourself to dim the light in his eyes.
on his seventeenth birthday, when your son makes his wish,
you pray for the slimmest chance that your son wishes
not to grow up.
on his eighteenth birthday you rush your son out of bed,
reminding him he would be late and telling him to hurry up,
until you stop and remember exactly what he was about to be late for,
and have realisation dawn upon you as you think this might have been
the last time you wake him out of bed.
you rush to the train station, as your son heaves his suitcase over
his shoulder and holds onto his ticket like a lifeline, as if it were the
one thing that made the difference between his world from yours,
the hope he had to the hope he was about to lose.
you see him off to the nine o'clock train, basking in the light in his eyes,
knowing it would be the last you would ever see of them.
you watch as he jostles his way through the crowd, with his back turned
away from you and towards the train boarding away from the last place
he would have been able to call home,
as he disappears into the sea of faces.
you search for something familiar about him in the crowd,
a coat the same colour as his, a suitcase similar to his,
your eyes were desperately scanning about,
but you found nothing.
war will laugh as it takes your son and the light in his eyes for its own,
watching you desperately search the crowd for one last look at him
before your son was no longer yours.
but do not weep, for war is kind.
your son will make friends at war, of course. they speak of him
in hushed tones and whispers amongst themselves, snickering,
"that kid's still got hope."
and it is in the crest of dawn, the hours far past light out,
that your son lies sleeplessly in his bunk as he replays the words
his comrades speak of him in his head and thinks,
"i'll either fight or die trying."
and it is in his stubbornness that come months of enduring
rigorous training, months of waking up to a ceiling he has yet
to become familiar with, he is sent to war.
he marches into the battlefield with a purposeful stride,
for he was at war, one of the greatest honours a man could
be bestowed, was it not?
it is uneventful, for most of it, and so he spends his days
writing your letters back home and sleeping in trenches,
as he slowly starts to forget what the ceiling in his old room
looked like, for every night he saw not a ceiling but
a starless sky.
and so every night he willed himself to sleep under the starless
sky, curled in the hole dug into the ground that edged
on no man's land, with no one but the earthworms for company.
though you have yet to known it from his letters, your son once
wakes up not to his internal body clock but to the sound of
enemy fire shooting through the air, and the shouts of his men
that rang in his ears as clear as day.
in sheer panic from the chaos that was ensuing,
he remembers his commander telling them,
"tell brave deeds of war."
and so he does not take a stern stand but he runs - he runs to
save not anyone's life but his own, as he sprints through the
ongoing battlefield, not knowing to whom all the bodies he had
sidestepped belonged to, their features mangled in recognition.
and he crouches in the bunker, the shouts of his men still ringing
in his ears and gunshots firing through the air, covering his ears,
knowing well it wouldn't have done anything to block out the
screams of which he didn't know to whom they had belonged to,
be it his allies or his enemies.
his comrades were dying, all while he did nothing but cower behind
a slab of concrete, as gunfire sounded from every direction.
"perhaps there were braver deeds than this," your son thinks,
in the bitter run for his life.
but do not weep, young maiden, for the worst is yet to come.
war is fair, war is kind - wars knows not mercy and kills indiscriminately,
for its men were born to drill and die, your son realises as he stands
on the battlefields where soldiers had drawn their first breaths of war -
and their last.
war is fought by the same minds on different sides,
to return home and to put guns down.
war will gun its men down and pick over the bones -
but do not weep, for war is fair.
for come the end, and war will have all its soldiers heed its call.
in the barracks for the first time since they'd returned, he thinks
of how there are significantly more empty beds than before, and
he knows everyone else knows it but dares not to speak of it. he
also knows that the mess hall is far emptier than it used to be,
stuck out like sore thumbs.
on the train back home, your son thinks back on his words,
declaring to either fight or die trying, and marvels at his naivety.
he thinks of all letters his men had been writing, crouched
in the corners and curled up in trenches, scribbling away at the
parchment, and he thinks - of all that wasted paper, the ink.
death in battle is honourable, his commander had told him,
as the image of him laying dead on the ground flashed in your
son's mind. fleeing in battle, certainly wasn't.
war was never really over, for though the treaties may have been
signed, his memories of battle weren't going to disappear from his mind.
and so when you welcome your son home from war, remember
that he hold in his mind memories known to him alone.
for many of those left home are still waiting - only to have
received military officials who send their condolences, to have
all the paper they wrote on and all the ink they used to go merely to waste.
he returns from war, thinking of all the soldiers who couldn't.
perhaps war was fought to end other wars and to wage even
more, but war is kind, and to those lucky enough to survive it,
war sends them back home, if only to never let them be the
same again.
for your son has not tasted the word home in years,
and it just doesn't feel the same anymore.
he will carry on, despite being a different person,
so long as the silver lining in the storm remains,
so long as you will be there to welcome him when he returns,
so long as he has a home to return to.
~ skp