Poem: "Coda of Honor"

[ysabetwordsmith]

Name: ysabetwordsmith
Title: "Coda of Honor"
Colors: Vellum #1 Coda
Supplies and Styles: None.
Word Count: 175
Rating: G
Warnings: No standard warnings apply.

Here is the freebie for the April 2013 Crowdfunding Creative Jam over on crowdfunding.

The following poem belongs to my series An Army of One: The Autistic Secession in Space. This is science fiction set in the gap between the Carina-Sagittarius arm and the Orion-Cygnus arm, a no-man's-land known as the Lacuna. Themes include war, peace, diversity, persecution, tolerance, society, freedom, fellowship, problem-solving, and survival.


"Coda of Honor"


The Lacuna came out of a space between,
came into existence in a space between.

It was about the lull after a conflict,
and the hidden tension that grows
when the guns are no longer firing
and harsh words go unspoken.

It was about the pauses within a conflict,
the cease fires and the armistices
that were never the kind of peace
which is more than an absence of war.

It was about the causes behind a conflict,
the differences between people
that made them focus on where they disagreed
instead of concentrating on where they agreed.

The people of the Lacuna respected this.
It was their history, in them and of them,
and so much larger than any of them.

They thought about it, code and coda,
honor and errantry, all of the things
that had come to pass.

They appreciated those gaps in battle,
hitched pauses between painful words,
heated space between hand and skin.

The fact that they honored this, instead of
hurrying through it, set them further apart.

Comments

[bookblather]

I like the idea of honoring the pauses and the liminal spaces-- I think it's something that doesn't happen enough, and the ending of this poem highlighted that even more.

Thank you!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Yes, that's a theme for the whole series An Army of One. It's about the places in between, and the people on the fringe, and what happens when those create a new center of their own.