Tides Rise and Fall

By Michael Luketich

Standing here with 40 years behind
and something less than 40 ahead, I
am struck with the dumbfoundedness
of a child who begins to unravel the 
mystery of the unimaginable reality
that life is not fair and even those you
love and rely upon may, if hungry or
angry or bored, take what is yours as
if their own and, your protestations still
are ineffective: it was not your inability
to speak that betrayed your cause – “if
they only knew,”

    well, they know and
take as enthusiastically as if they took
because they knew as if knowledge,
not ignorance, was itself the cause of 
the taking: the knowledge that you,
bound as you are by high chairs
and small arms, with voice wavering
and weak with emotion and pain are of
no importance. They love you – oh yes,
but love, it seems, is the right to take
from another person all that you want
in exchange for something you do not
mind giving away.

And they close their ears and grow ever
angrier as you scream and protest, but even
when you “win,” when they begin to beg
and plead with you to be silent: to offer 
bribes and soft words, you know these
gifts are borne from a peculiar kind of 
love – the love of peace, the love of status
quo, the love of an ideal, into which you
are welcomed to play your small role, so
long as you stick to the script: go through
the motions and hit the marks they have
helpfully taped onto the floor, “for your
benefit.” For your benefit to them: to their
memory, to their reputations, to their status
quo. Yes, I have been blessed with the
ignorance of youth: the stubbornness to
believe that, behind it all, there is something
more to all of this, as if simply learning more
will make sense of the senselessness that
crashes upon your senses like emeralds
upon white-sanded shores, each of which
takes some pure white innocence with it
back to the depths of the darkness, easing
as the tides from time to time, a false
promise of peace before the next onslaught
comes again to pull more light sand
into the dark seas. Sands so powerful when
impacted together, but each grain unwilling
to hold its neighbor to itself, so quick to 
release and let others go, while it remains
gleaming in the sun, as pure and white as
you were the moment before consummation.

Michael Luketich holds undergraduate degrees in journalism and economics from Ohio University and a law degree from NYU. An Air Force veteran, he's lived in the desert, the jungle, and many places in between.