Today is Veterans Day

Will humanity evolve beyond the need for creating bigger and better, costlier and deadlier weapons? Beyond the necessity of soldiers of any rank and file? Beyond the tears of loved ones who shall never touch their soldiers again? Beyond the anger and the vengeance of the ‘other side’? I don’t know. Do you? Is anyone listening out there?


Moses Is His Name


“What have you become most proficient in?”… I ask the gawking
baby-faced teenager, except that he’s almost 30 and had seen more than
his fair share of ‘making history in the making’..
“Survival.” “Survival”, you say.
“No, it’s more than that, it has to be.”
“Don’t count on it.”

“Ok.” “How do you survive?”

“That’s tricky, dear.” “It’s like asking how the sun also rises.”

“Ok.” “I get it.”

“You don’t know for sure, do you?”

“No. And nobody does either.”

“Just doing our doing. Not so sure these days. The bad guys don’t
wear 10 gallon black hats anymore, besides, I’ve never been quite
sure who the bad guys are without someone up the ranks pointing them
out, now that I’m all grown-up and play for real.”

“Like the politicians and the emperors, and the religious factions and
that pesky thing called ‘society?’”, I ask.

“Sure. Lots of folks on that f***ed up bandwagon. It gets real subtle too, after watching it, defending your life so to speak, while listening to the cross-fire, bullets whizzing past your head, and you know it don’t make no bit of difference to the holy ground where you get buried. “

“Thanks, for the conversation Pvt. Moses Jones. Before I forget, how did you get your first name?”

“Funny you should ask that on Veteran’s Day. At least that’s one day we’re not forgotten and someone or another gets curious about stories and such.”



Dear Veteran


Dear Veteran
I honour you today
I salute you
not because you have fought
not because you have returned
not because you have been or will
be buried under the good earth.

Did you know before you left when
that moment would come to pass?
when and where a bullet or explosion
had your name in its firm grasp?

I salute you
not because you are sound in mind
body and spirit
or because you are shattered.

not because your wild eyes speak
or because your lips are silent.

I salute you today
because unlike marriage vows to cherish
or the priests of many a parish
unlike the thousand and one untruths that
are spoken by us all,

you kept your promise
when you heard the call.




Peace,
Anna



The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Robert M. Pirsig