“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
Walking the streets of the hometown I left 50 years ago, I’m aware the stranger-others at windows will think “I do not know him.” My father walked to this office during a heart attack, across the way the corner where Joey launched the ice-ball that bloodied a poor girl’s head, here the street where night herons roosted in sycamores. Here the brick school, massive, immortal, where we gathered to play games and learn some ways of men. Everywhere the alleys […]
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When they burned the Church of Les Innocents, crowds gathered in the streets, and when the night air breached the shattering roof, the flames rose as if roused from their refuge by the fire bells of the Rue St. Denis. Sparks the shape of pigeons flew from the burning rafters, and for moments longer than one might expect kept beating into the darkness. Some in the crowd cried out, “Souls! Souls are being released! Look! Look how they rise toward Heaven.”
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Gil knew Junkers and Heinkels whose synchronized engines called out from the darkness above his farm, the migratory clamor he can hear even now and say “That’s theirs!” Enmeshed in the metal roaring of every particle of air, he stood at the edge of a field when 3 Spitfires jumped him, and inside the speed-boy-low-pushed-back-hump of the cockpit, the pilot saw him and nodded his head. He pushed close, cheek touching the brick wall on hearing the droning bee buzz […]
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He has died or should have three or four times by his reckoning but come back to spin like a lucky top in his storytelling, this recital of 23 bones broken in a T-bone in Alabama, an 8 inch screw fixing his hips in line and a scar the curving length of barbed wire he showed me by hoisting his shirt to prove how well it had healed. He […]
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