Reserve and Preserve: a prose poem
Military reserves. Kept separate. People as stock and assets. Retain to fight for peace. Military preserves? Warring, killing for the right to free. Spill blood to save. The side with the loudest voices, bloodiest hands, most guns wins. Use up all reserves, ’til nothing left but death. Step back from the skeletons, boys dying for a freedom where we can tell you what to do with your body, tell you because of our ancient old men’s writings we call religion, free if you do what we tell you to do. Die to be free but not free. No. Put down the gun, pick up the book. Pick up the mirror. Look each other in the eye. See that each of us are more alike than different, and this is truly what we fear, why we want to fight — what we must face — and why we must instead hold each other in our hearts, preserve our own choice to be kind.
Can’t sit here. Reserved. No open spot. Closed door. Segregate our pasture. Preserve our limited way of looking at life. White sheep. Black sheep. Rainbow sheep. Don’t fit into this categorical, bucketed, labelled, binary world we have cultured. Lost, lone eyes look over the grass, find a way over the fence. Out of the pasture, beyond the pastured preserve.
Reserve grand champion. Honorable mention. Second place. Not quite good enough. Not the expected excellence, no status of perfection, trying to preserve the pre-sculpted passage handed down, an ill-fitting suit, a journey of pretentious pebbles leading to a concreted life in someone else’s shoes. Pause, step off the path, past the brambles, let the babbling brook drown out their disapproval, barefoot on grass, arms out, stroll soundly in sun.
Reserve to save, to hide, to secret away. Reserve to preserve when all else is taken away. Bury in a wall, behind a floor board, in the ground by a tree. After the apocalypse, the pandemic, in the war when you have to flee, when he has abused you for the last time, when you’re ready to run away, when at last you’re all alone: pry up the board, remove the plaster, dig the dirt, there it is: your treasure, recalled, it remains.
June 11, 2023
Tansy Julie Soaring Eagle Paschold
