Beneath the earth lay our fears

that rise if we sit with what seems dead.

For how long can tears be shed at the gravestone

without flowers blooming, inviting a new day?

Tough flowers sprout after violent storms

though tears seem worthless for nurturing seeds.

Does the breeze stir to further monsoons

blow petals beyond the borders of our world?

Breezes blow while the monsoons pass

and the warmth of the sun

knows how to hug the patient sod.

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez:

  -...when I hear Americans talking about their need for emotional closure, I realize just how awful our fear of the past is.  This country has been written in tragedy, and we have been willing to forget it.  It doesn't seem too far fetched to me that in another generation this might be forgotten too. Americans are brilliant at that.  We have given ourselves to amnesia.  That's why the world wants to come here.  We could call the land virgin, we imagine it is a place where nothing had ever happened here before and where every tragedy is the loss of our innocence.  Even your question proposes that now we will have to face this thing, but we have never done so before.  The Civil War was not the loss of our innocence after all.  World  War II was not the loss of our innocence.  We keep getting past it.  We are puzzled by Bosnia.  We are puzzled by Northern Ireland.  We are puzzled by wars that persist. We are puzzled by the Middle East.  We are puzzled by Israel and the Palestinians.  We don't know why they can't solve it, and that's our best American impulse, I think - just to put an end to it.  We say, you can't go on fighting forever like the Hatfields and McCoys.  Move to California. Move to Georgia.  Leave your in-laws behind.  Do something, but don't get mired in the past.  It's brilliant.

The tragedy and irony is, many of us belong to memory religions, and this is the great, continual contradiction in our lives.  We come out of a culture that is so individualistic, so Hellenistic, so centered on the individual's possibilities of moving beyond the group, beyond family, beyond community, reestablishing, redefining, re-imagining himself as herself, whatever - and we are also people who call ourselves Christians and Jews and Muslims, and therefore belong to an entire tradition.  We have never been able to resolve the two impulses, and so we are constantly at war.  We want to pray before the football game in East Texas, and then some individual takes the case to the Supreme Court, and the Greeks in their temple decide in favor of the I.  We struggle constantly with how much to remember and how much to choose to forget, or pretend to forget.