Freed an owl from a silvery net today, a small kindness to one life from another. If it doesn’t recognize how its future was suddenly altered, what will it remember to pass to its chicks?

A thousand years from now, who will remember Korea, the Gunboat War, Denmark-Norway? The names might survive in archives, but the true memorial to a conflict is in the memories of those who struggled, lost and alone, for each gain, who were actually scarred by each loss.  

I would sing you memories of women I shouldn’t have loved or hungered for, but the words would be meaningless from the start. There are names and faces even I no longer recognize, and I was there.