Soliloquy On Nanking, Sixty-One Years Later

(This was written directly following, and still under the influence, of two most unrelated books I had just finished absorbing, in September 1998, Berlin: one concerning the craft and genius of Edward de Vries, Earl of Oxford, alias “Wm. Shakespeare;“ and the other, Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII, as it occurred in 1937. I shared the following result with Ms. Chang in a personal correspondence, which she gratefully acknowledged in a personal postcard. To my profound sadness, googling her name many years after, I discovered she had taken her life, still young, there on the West Coast. The strain of what she had to go through to give us this book, had been too great. Now, as I had dedicated this to the victims, I give it to the public in her beloved honor.)

We distance us from hist'ry at our peril;
as human beings we owe it to our future -
the Holocaust and Nanking share this feature:
to forget, deny, avoid these makes us sterile.

Nanking sits hard upon the heart, burns 'neath the skin;
it ices up the blood, robs one of speech -
these words but shadows of all the heart could teach:
the wails of such long gone, 's were my kith and kin.

The Silence is my rock and my devotion,
to which I turn in hours of smould'ring grievance -
my rage and tender infinite remembrance:
what's left me, but command all my emotion?

Unfinished matters lie upon the conscience,
quite larger than one's private circumstance;
though not the lives, their mem'ry saved in balance
against the tide of Sleep's smiling complacence.

Their relevance long questioned, facts forgotten -
and still no part of public education! . . .
The shrieks from Nanking's mothers, boys, young women
do testify 'gainst th' indifferent and the rotten.

One feels not smarter, rather dirty, for the knowing;
Nanking's ordeal a fraction of the story -
yet alone, outnumb'ring Hiroshima, Nagasaki:
hardly yet's th' aggressor reap'd what he was sowing!

Some pain's required to make this heart awaken;
the shattered heart prepares the way for prayer -
while joy indeed may wax with this wayfarer,
these wounds daily renewed likewise are taken.