Tonight, as this image came in, I wanted to just turn away from my computer and weep.

May ten-thousand holy red lotus bloom for every holy red lotus cut down.

I prophesy: Retrieve all the red robes of the dead and pile them high. Higher. Highest. The Monks’ Memorial of Red Robes. It will be made. By thousands of hands from the world over, the Red Robe Memorial commemorating this slaughter of the innocents, will rise up.

And play these images over and over again until we can watch them dry eyed… Than Schwe’s huge, televised, well documented, well photographed, news reported, electronically captured week of slaughter, Than Schwe’s desperate not moment, not hour, not week, but years of SHAME. A kind of shame that will cause no decent world leader to ever again willingly stand to be photographed with him. A kind of shame that surely makes even his soul shrink away from him in revulsion.

Can it be fitting to make a pre-Elegy for Senior General Than Schwe, the unelected, self-appointed military leader of Burma, who brought what you see above to bear on innocents? By reports trickling in tonight, some are saying that Schwe brought death a thousand times over this week to the holy men. Can it be true that Than Schwe has, in the last three days, murdered unprecedented numbers of monks?

I cannot even conceive of what will putrefy on a man’s soul from his willfully murdering holy people: Romero, who was murdered at the altar saying Mass, will surely greet all the noble Buddhist monks; as will ‘all the preacher men and women’ who were strung up on trees, not begging but praying; as will all the zaddiks and the rebbes who carefully took off, kissed and folded their striped robes first, before the Nazis forced them naked to the slaughter.

Tonight, I oddly keep hearing a dissonant shred of a song in my mind that won’t quit. And, I fall into my own empty words tonight, rowing like a maniac to try to say something even pitifully useful… a story… in the end, that’s all I have… a little shred of story to hang as a flag over the innocent

Somewhere in our souls I feel certain, we all know the truth of this old tale that was told in my family, about the king who endlessly sowed dragons’ teeth so as to grow endless sharp swords from those teeth, to effortlessly grow an army of slaughter…

Let this then be the elegy for Than Schwe

The king endlessly sowed dragons’ teeth so as to grow endless sharp swords… The king thereby caused the swords to spring up in the fields and give chase to and murder whomever he named… and he always named the poor, the poorest of the poor…

….until one night when the swords, red and tired from their days work and lying together in the fire at rest, spoke to one another saying they had after all these years, murdered every one who was poor, the poorest of the poor, until now there were no more poor people left to kill.

…And so, not wanting to be put out of their employment, the bloody swords rose up as one sword and killed the king, saying the king himself was poor….poor of heart and poor of spirit, the poorest of the poor… and thereby the king himself deserved to die.

My crabbed grandmother who sometimes called herself our “Grand Other” told this tale. She’d pause at the end of this story to pass a finger over her white whiskers. She told us the king had a choice, that we all do. The king could live rich in spirit and soul, or else he could choose to reap for himself what he sowed for others.

Than Schwe, I think, is past the choice point. The only question may now be, where do the swords rest in the fire, and what do they decide and when.

That tiny slip of song running through trying to find its way? Perhaps in Burma and elsewhere in the world tonight in the meantime, ‘the broken-hearted people of the world still agree… there will be an answer…’

… and our prayer is a strong: ‘Let it be, let it be.’

Though some may perhaps decide “Let it be,’ means ‘leave it alone, there’s no more you can do’… I think it means something different:

…that the road is always freakin’ longer than we ever imagined or ever were told by some Twinkie-eyed stupe. But, despite all ideals we were taught that turned out to have plenty of bashes and scars on them… there remain ancient truths that are deeply reliable: one of the most salient is a Buddhist one, one that would, I would hope, please and honor the dead in Burma: No matter what, continue trying to walk as mindfully as possible

That might be an invisible but palpable Red Robe Memorial that we could carry everywhere.