THE UNMARKED TOMB

Have you ever had that kind of dream that stays with you even after you wake for the morning?

This morning before I woke I dreamed of some people close to me, people I love, but with whom so much messy and unrecorded history lies between us. Then I wrote this poem.

When I was young the grown ups waged a war, many tried and many died, and one side lost the war.

Their sons and I would like to try and build back some kind of peace, so we return to the place of words and lies and more.

We look to unravel the story, the pain, the shame, whatever gains, to understand what lies behind our pain, why this wall of separation that we didn’t build tears our city in two and leaves our hearts left bleeding.

We look for the tombs of the past, but they’ve been erased.

This empty field shouts a silent accusation at us!

No one died, no one lied, no one won and no one lost. No one built the wall, certainly not us.

Go! Shouts the field in it’s mocking beauty and silence. The glorious color of its flowers a glare in our eyes.

Go home and forget what you never should have remembered and let die what lies inside, the pain these unmarked graves will forever hide.

When history is erased.

There is a dangerous tendency within us as humans to want to rewrite or perhaps worse yet erase entirely the messy parts of our history.

Even when it’s well intended, the editor of history almost always lets bleed onto the page their own views and biases. Thinking they are clarifying truth, they inevitably create lies.

The outcome of altering or erasing history is that like any lie, it’s not true and some part of us knows it and is disturbed by it’s incongruity.

What follows next is always marred by the lie of alteration or erasure. It becomes like a crooked tower built on an uneven foundation or a corrupted crop grown in unhealthy soil.

Eventually time and distance have a way of crumbling the false and the true begins to break forth again, the tombs of our history are never truly unmarked, but the pain and evil before that day is a shame.

This week on the podcast I ask the question: What should I be doing during an election year?

You can listen to it right now on your favorite podcasting app: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

The choice.

Trying to unravel the truth from the lie in the past is difficult and not really what I am asking us to do today, though often it’s an admirable endeavor.

The choice I’m asking us to make is at once both easier and more difficult to do because it’s really all in our hands.

I’m asking us to choose to not rewrite history, alter the facts, or erase the record going forward.

To be clear I’m not just talking about large scale history, like that of nations. I’m also talking about our personal histories. Where we did wrong, where others did right, the facts.

I believe there is a way to record history that is accurate without being gratuitous. The Bible does this well in it’s record of what happened whether it shines a positive light on the “heroes” of the story or not.

Let’s tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. Only then can we leave a monument that our children can visit and learn from, even if their first lesson is grief or otherwise.

No more unmarked tombs that leave unanswered questions for those who come after us, and a wall where there should be a way forward.

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See you next Thursday!

Geno Schmelzer,