Requiem for What Used to Be

We have lain in the place of deepest darkness,

Curled up in a fetal position with our arms around our very core

To protect ourselves from the next blow that is coming

And to keep ourselves from shaking to pieces from the agony that we feel

Because of the blows that have already fallen

We have lost our closest loved ones,

Watching them die slowly and then all at once,

Coming upon their cold and ashen bodies

And wondering how they could so closely resemble the ones we love,

And yet be so entirely different

We have stood at the precipice of the door of death,

Hearing gunshot after gunshot

And knowing that this, now, is our time to die,

We are next,

And there is no stopping what is coming

We have been forced from our homes and all that is familiar,

Leaving behind treasured memories and all sense of stability,

We have journeyed a thousand miles

One step at a time,

And never asked where we were going

Because we could not fathom what it would look like when we got there,

And we didn’t have time to process the fact

That the home we once knew was gone,

Lost forever in a place called “past” and “then” and “erstwhile”

We sweat blood and cry endless rivers of tears,

This is deepest darkness, this is loss, this is death, this is trauma,

And we have endured it, we have suffered what not everyone has suffered,

And there is an inherent link between those who have known great loss and true sorrow

We have cried out to God to save us from oppression

As those who hold the reins of power in society make choices and laws that can only ever hurt us,

They seem not to care how what they do affects us so long as it benefits them,

We have sworn and raged and submitted and pacified,

We have fought with our voices, with marching, with guns, with swords,

We have stood together and died together and lived apart

We have listened to the voices of those who forecast hardship,

Stood by as that which we had worked so hard for was stripped away from us,

And we were left bare and naked out in the cold,

Exposed for the world to see and judge,

Though they did not judge truly for the world was not just,

And though we did the best we could,

It did not save us in the end

We have felt the flames of terror,

Famine and pestilence, betrayal and abandonment,

And the certainty that loss is the only constant in life

As the world swirled around us, dissolving and floating away,

Ashes on a breeze,

Gone before we could even inhale the scent of the smoke that is all that remains of the world we once knew,

And each of us, all alone, stood on the line between past and future

And became a little child again,

Crying out for mother and for home, for the simplest comfort of a warm hug and a glass of milk

We have suffered! And our suffering can neither be negated nor denied

Nor dismissed by those who cannot understand,

And in the end, once the world has completely collapsed all around us

And we have finally faced the fact that

Nothing will ever be the same again,

We have taken a deep breath and realized

That we have survived,

I am alive,

And from this place of simple existence in the here and now,

Perhaps we can build a new world, a new existence, a new way of being,

Though it will not look like the old

Only now what we build will be deeper

And the spectrum of light that is included in this new world we paint for ourselves

Is much wider than it was before,

As we include both darkness and light

For we realize

That healing doesn’t mean that the pain goes away,

It simply takes its place in the tapestry of creation that we weave around us

By the very fact that we exist, we are here,

We are still alive

We paint with nuance and gentle brushstrokes that show the light and the darkness: One,

We can see now what we could not see before,

What others still cannot see if they have not faced this agony,

The simple fact of existence:

That life and death are no more different than night and day,

Arbitrarily assigned by lines of time created by man for efficiency’s sake—

Thus I awaken, thus I sup, thus I repose, thus I dream—

But the sun does not set at the same time every day,

And the delineation between day and night is not so clear

Existence never ends, though appearances may change,

And time may record difference and growth,

But it does not alter the fact that we are,

We hear it in our heartbeats,

In our very breath,

We see it in the ruins and void that surrounds us,

We feel it in the mortal agony and the exquisite joy that thrum in our cores

And produce shaking, hyperventilating terror and deep belly laughs

We know it,

We know…

Such a steep price, this knowledge

That has led us to understand the words that Moses heard coming from a bush

That both burned eternally and never died,

I AM that I AM

So we are,

Still here independent of the world that collapsed around us,

Of the ones who have been lost to us,

Of the way things used to be,

O farewell to normality!

And now we know,

Goodbye all that was,

Here I AM…

Hello to what will be.