Posts Tagged ‘bring them home’

The final day of April, and I kept my eyes peeled for any new item from which to prognosticate futures, or present meaning in my world.  It seemed a pretty dull day….the same things I had seen before in the week, when I picked up other bits of debris: the Folgers cannister caught in the arms of the blackberry thicket, a plastic bag caught in high tree branches, and a single large tennis shoe in the ditch.

It wasn’t until I turned homeward and switched sides of the road in the marsh that I found today’s last little bit of roadside sadness: the tiny body of a duckling, far from where the ducks would nest.  I thought about how it came to be here, it seemed too small to have been walking in train behind its mother and crossing the road.  And most of even the most hardened drivers are so charmed at the sight of a duck with a train of four to seven yellow ducklings that they do stop to allow them safe crossing.  Some predator, hawk or owl, or cat, must have scooped it from its nest, but dropped it for unknown reason.  So here it lay, small enough to be completely enclosed in my hand with it’s downy coat muddied and wet.  Far from home, far from rescue and aid and in this remote place with no witness to sing over its body.  Nature seems as careless of its young as mankind often proves itself to be.

This one was too simple for your roadside Sybil, the age numbers of the recent death lists from Iraq and Afghanistan rose unbidden in my mind.  For reasons unclear to me, the age “19″ unhinges my mind and heart every time.  There have been 18 year olds killed in this war, and a lot of 19 year olds.  America’s ducklings, far from home and with insufficient witnesses to their homecoming caskets.  Crushed at roadsides more remote than the marsh, bodies tossed and broken by IEDs or RPGs as surely as this tiny feathery bit of mortality.

I want them home, although the changes wrought by war will make them in some senses forever unsafe, they will be safer here than there.  I want those boys with unfledged minds and bodies home, and those girls, too.  America’s ducklings, precious and darling to the eye……..far away and in harm’s way.  I have sung enough in requiem to wring my heart dry, and yet it is not done.