Poem of the Day: When people say, “we have made it through worse before”

When people say, “we have made it through worse before”

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones

of those who did not make it, those who did not

survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

 

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.

I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms

meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

 

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no

solace in rearranging language to make a different word

tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

 

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.

Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are

people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

 

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future

to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not

live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

 

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left

standing after the war has ended. Some of us have

become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

 

— Clint Smith