If this is what is, if this is what it comes to
if any living soul can recover any identifiable piece of anything
belonging to the silver bird or to the souls aboard,
a seat cushion, an ear bud, a wallet, a cell phone,
a pacifier, a hearing aide, a cane, a bra, a baseball cap–
that —that kind of ‘I know that item belonged to my loved one’
–that would be the worst-best that could ever happen
for the raggedy hearts still able to walk as though alive
while walking in the no mans’ land of not-knowing yet.
The mind does not play tricks and the heart does not lie.
When many of faith say, they believe their loved one is alive
they can mean this in so many ways…
Long ago I remember stateside wives of soldiers in Vietnam…
their husbands were Air Force and Navy pilots who were MIA…
I remember the wives inquiring and unearthing any mite of dust
years and years after ‘officials’ turned the phrase from ‘rescue mission,’
to ‘recovery mission,’ to ‘nil,’ case closed:permanent MIA
–but not closed ever in any heart of love. Not ever.
And some scoffed at the ‘phantasies’ of the women.
But most understood if/when they thought of their own children,
their lovers, or a good heeler or a beloved feline–
that were any lost, the world would be rocked backward on its axis
to try to bring them home again.
Most women of those MIA never gave up
that one day somewhere, somehow,
their beloved someone, the father of their children,
the sons of mothers, the boys of dads,
the brothers, the uncles, the cousins, the grandfathers…
would somehow come walking down the road
toward home,
flight jacket slung over shoulder
jaunty hat
smiling so young even as their wives were now silver haired…
that the lost men would be seen walking
toward home, their homes that had stood
like a shattered-windowed heart on the road for decades…
but now their homes brightened in joy
as though all electricity suddenly restored.
And this belief that someday, somehow,
was in part held in the older stories told
about the men who walked out of the Pacific jungles
years after World War II had ended, some having
been brain injured and forgotten who they were;
some shot down and taken in by farmer families
and nursed back to health and having fallen in love
with the children or the village or the youngest daughter…
and some walking out of an unknown, unmapped jungle
years later, having lived off the land, having buried
all peers, and saying, in some ‘loyal to the end’ daze–
they had not realized the war was over.
And too, the stories of cats and dogs and birds
and elephants and horses who have found, though
exiled, stranded or lost thousands of miles away–
have one day galloped, limped, trumpeted at the
gate of their loved ones again, having painfully
walked and dragged overland, hiding, being captured
time and again and escaping time and again,
for days and for years leaping and loping toward home.
Those stories are not tricks of the mind.
They are some of the most carved truths
carried in the tales of the thousand cranes
about love and loyalty to heart ideals —
The winged ones may remain invisible to some…
but for those with eyes to hear,
for those with eyes to see,
the 1000 cranes are deep sense memory
and memory of miracles past and present–
carried on weight of mere feathers and hollow bones.
CODA
I find the ‘old China’ mandate that insisted on only one child to a family–or else– is particularly cruel for some of the old mothers and old fathers waiting to hear what happened to Flight MH 370, as it was their only child, and in one case, only child, only daughterinlaw, only grandchild, who were on Flight MH370. Let us hold the caring shawl, the prayerline strong for all, for ourselves as well, for hearing the close in stories of the persons waiting for the ‘show me the irrefutable evidences of what you say is so’– hurts some tender part of many a mind who instinctively loves humanity and does not ever want to see innocents suffer like this.
The image: 1000 Cranes