When gawking at ruins
in far off lands, when taking
photos of them and of
the picturesque locals
for your collections,
please remember
that each person you see
is in their own way also a ruin:
beautiful, vital and worthy
of attention and respect
from you, still here and surviving
right where they were placed,
yet still a ruin
in terms of not being today
what they might have become if,
too often, armies and generations
of people like your own had not come
and swept all before them
into collections
of their own.
Dark Matter 
December 30th, 2015 at 10:21 pm
Visited a military museum in Shrewsbury, England about ten years ago. It’s a smallish town with a long long history of its finest being lost in wars. The lists included the same family names down through centuries. And the enemies became the allies, and the allies became the enemies….over and over and over. And just the year before we were there, the IRA had set off a bomb in this small obscure museum. My maiden name was O”Leary. My father was Catholic and my mother was Methodist. So, I never really “got” the point of the “troubles.” But, when I visited Ireland I got my first understanding of why the conflict had been so prolonged and bitter. And it was not about religion. It was about power, freedom, greed and need.
That little museum with it’s long tragic history of the people of that town just overwhelmed me with sadness and feelings of futility at the incredible stupidity of war. And yet we never learn.