Our Sons and Their Mothers

A few weeks ago a friend of mine (one of the few beautiful people that still mail things) sent me a photograph clipped from the newspaper.  It was of a six year old boy in Syria carrying a rifle nearly as tall as himself.  The boy looks quite cheerful, actually, walking with great confidence in his yellow polo shirt and cargo pants.  The picture stays on my desk, and I wonder about him often.  Saturday morning I tore a quote of Harriet Tubman’s out of an interview with Jesmyn Ward in Poets and Writers Magazine.

“We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”

I placed it with the picture on my desk.  So many of the world’s children are trained to fight–either on streets in neighborhoods or in far off lands–but are never trained on how to metabolize violence and so often die from it in one way or another.

This morning as my sons got into the car ahead of me, I had a sudden, throat constricting realization that their limbs are lengthening and soon beards will start growing and there are people in the world who are already afraid of their names.  Sometimes Hurricane needs to sit in my lap and cry while I hold him and even when my arms are no longer big enough to encircle him and my legs aren’t strong enough to bear his weight, he will be my child, just as all of these men are somebody’s children.  And there aren’t enough tears in the world.