Men At War

Do you not know, that you men have a penchant for going off to do battle?  Be they affairs of tooth and nail, common fisticuffs or bar room brawls, or full blooded holocausts in trenches overflowing with the foul stench of death.  Men declare war. Even when you conscientiously object, you are engaged in a fight - you fight for not wanting to fight.

 

Or it may be a war of a completely different kind, where you retreat into your darkened man caves to battle your own demons:  things that have bothered you since boyhood, that have dogged your days for you can't remember how long.  You only know that you dream them all the time,  but you tell nobody. Your enemies follow you despite your wily, sudden detours round sharp corners, so that whatever you do to rid yourself of these ancient ghosts, these phantoms that deal daily death to your soul, you know that you cannot defeat them until you actually look them in the whites of their eyes, and choose either to overcome once and for all by declaring that you no longer cared, or succumb forever to their heartless haunting by continuing to run.

 

But whatever your struggle, your beef, your bain, do you not know that it is your womenfolk who are left behind as your living widows, to wait in a forever hiatus and heartache for you to come home?  Whether whole, or in pieces? 

 

We are the ill-fated, fairer sex, who are built to withstand the long lonely nights, the barren seasons that bear no harvest.  We reap no respite for our anticipation while we wait for our men who are constructed for confrontation to return.  We gamely swallow our incomprehension why you have to go and fight at all to begin with, and silently suffer the undissolving lump of bitterness stuck in our long, delicate, white throats.  We learn to endure the consequences of your unilateral decisions, to accept that our hunter-gathering halves must go forth into the wilderness places even of their hearts and minds, to beat the living daylights out of something to satisfy their innate blood lust.  We sit pretty in the picture window sill, outwardly calm as we embroider our unspoken grief in neverending lazy daisy chains, all the while our hearts becoming wrapped in so many layers of ice it would take a lifetime to thaw us out.

 

Yet wait we must, and wait we do.  We're gifted with long visioned eyes that know to scan the distant skyline;  we're adept at abiding;  at hoping against hope; at nursing our deepest fears of a perpetual poverty of heart;  at mouthing a lustreless litany of pleading prayers at a seemingly absent God.  He's mostly silent while we wait, probably gone off battling with you menfolk somewhere also.  So the women cope best as they can;  iron maidens singlehandedly battling down the hatches,  and braving the elements of a barren, interminable winter of discontent.

 

But should you ever return, if there is just a notion of you in the distance, if we hear the faintest whisper of a laying down of arms - we are there by your side in a trice.  You will find our arms encircled about you like a garland, mutely clinging, plaintive as the last of autumn's roses;  our noses buried in the hollow of your neck, deeply inhaling your long lost scent; our tresses tumbling upon your wide shoulders, soft as summer's waterfalls;  our hungry hearts beating against your chest like small birds frantic to escape their cages.

 

We will forgive all the pain of the past season of unpeace.  We will dress your wounds with unending soft  kisses, finger feathery yours scars and scabs of engagement to smooth them away. You would find in our open arms a cradle where we'd rock you till you forget all strains of battle, the unjust defeats, the lost ground and vanished hopes for conquering.  Instead of our daily dirges we would sing a lullaby to usher in a long forgotten slumber.

 

So fight your good fight while you must. Be men, be mice in battle.  But look to the east when the sun dawns in the morning, and remember that your lady waits, prays, hopes;  glistens in her eyes as they roam the horizons in search of your silhouette; strains to hear twiglets crackle under your retracing footfall.  And take pity on her, steeping sorrowful in silence's keeping.