Four Score Later, We Return - Dirk Dunning

[Lawrence Robinson]

Four Score Later, We Return

For my Uncle in-law
Keith Schooler Hickey, Pvt. 15th Infantry Regiment, of the 3rd Infantry Division
20 July 1923, Montana to 23 October 1944, somewhere near Mortagne, France

Keith,
and the boys beside him,
crossed seas, heat, mountains,
the long hideous argument of war.

North Africa first,
Italy after,
France at last,
in the Vosges,
where the trees close in,
and the earth itself
seems to hold its breath.

He did not live to see
the field go quiet.

He did not come home
to tell of it.

Only his name remains,
and his rank,
and the long line of the dead
who bore the weight
until the world could breathe again.

Now,
four score and four years on,
the wheel turns again.

The old disease
rises with new flags,
new voices,
old appetites.

From the Witch trials
to the three-fifths human,
to the war that broke a nation,
to a war that broke a world,
and now threatens again.

We are once more in the hour
when each careless word
has weight,
when silence can be a door opened,
when the hands of ordinary people
must decide
whether to stand and engage,
or step aside in shame.

So I think of Keith,
not as stone,
not as record only,
but as a life
given into history,
into mud,
into flame,
so that fascism might be stopped,
for a time.

And I think:

time is not mercy.
It only returns us
to what we have not finished.

So let this be a lament,
and a vow,
for those who died then,
for those who live now,
for the never-finished work
of refusing the lie, 
refusing the dark.

	- Dirk Dunning
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