MANY WILL NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY

This morning, I awoke to news that Pete Seeger had died peacefully after 96 years of breathing. For me, and for an untold many, he was a hero, a guide, a definer and, a clarifier. He was all that . . .  and much more. His life was as a beacon in seas of change.

In honor of Pete Seeger, I choose to share a writing of mine that was composed in mid-July, nine years ago from notes found scratched on notepaper the year prior. The writing "Eight Days in August" was never intended to be published.

                            EIGHT DAYS IN AUGUST

A partial night of fitful sleep. Recycled thoughts, a cacophony of images, all racing monkey-mind. Not peaceful. It's best to get up, leave the room, not to disturb Elizabeth.

So, that night, a year ago, I laid down in my backyard Guatemalan hammock. To me it was a familiar web of cotton strands, cradled between the 45-year old white pine and an equally old crabapple. Suspended over a gentle wildflower sanctuary, it is a favorite place to be. A good place to recenter - to look up at the distant night sky. Through the wispy frames of pine needles, star clusters faintly glimmer in a  kind of murkiness.

Star light straining to pierce the ever so polluted urban atmosphere.

Even so - I still could imagine the myriads of stars above the earth's envelope . . . just waiting for their chance of freedom.  I thought of the World Wide Web's launch on this very day in 1991. I thought of all the unleashed potential it offered for humankind to be knitted ever closer together in a common fabric.

I remember the hammock night sounds from that night. Pulsing calls of the diminutive lacewing insect, punctuating the autumn evening's cool. Perhaps a bit early . . . last year they began their calls in the middle of the month. Somewhere sounded the frantic flapping of a startled bird.  Like dry paper wings crackling against unforgiving branches.

Then came my dawnings from under that night sky. Awakenings flooded into me like a surge of unwanted water. On this very day, a mere sixty years ago, out there . . . somewhere, bomber pilots had just sent our payload. A single, one-hundred pound bomb. Sent downward, ground ward into a huge, urban mass of life and humanity.

Good God!

Forty times more children, women, and men were killed outright that morning . . .  more than all the stars I could ever possibly see as I scanned the heavens this night through the polluted air. It is said that some 78,000 died outright . . . on the spot. That some even evaporated. They say that another 62,000 died soon after. Many became sick. And stayed that way.

So . . . why couldn't I sleep that night? How could anyone sleep?

It was this week, eight years ago, my very first poem was given birth. Inspiration came while watching an insect's hopeless struggles in a vacated spider web. Death was coming long after the spider had abandoned its hammock of silk. I tried to help. It only made it worse.

It was then that it dawned on me that . . .  land mines are no different. They mindlessly wreak havoc on any living being that triggers their morbid mechanism. Some are made to look like toys. Children die most often. Children are so close to the ground. Adults are often maimed. Their vital organs are higher up. Farm animals die or have to be killed.

Tragedies set in motion for generations to come . . . with a predictable unpredictability.

That day, a first effort of a poem (Debris) was born, fully-formed, longing to find its way, across the world, through the World Wide Wed. Since then, more poems have found me and crept from my pen. Some published, most not.

Many will never see the light of day