Beautiful Girls

The search for a meaningful life
in a stable society ("Beautiful Girls") versus
the search for meaning in a war zone
("Men With Guns"). Finding and being found
by a woman, enjoying some romance, having
children and in that context earning a living
which becomes what you say when someone asks
what you do.

The doctor's conscious, organized, naive attempt
to do good, his legacy, versus the randomness
of the road and the war zone. There
his legacy is his rectitude and natural
rough compassion for the damaged people
he encounters. The difference
between planning a legacy as if you knew
enough to control events
and letting the legacy arise
from events themselves, controlling,
insofar as you are able, only
your own actions and reactions. The doctor's
leadership role such as it was grew out of
not his material possessions like the car
but his mission, his personal quest to find
the young doctors he had naively trained and sent
into the war zone where all died.

Not one beautiful girl doubted
happiness lay in locating a good man
with whom to raise children, not neglecting
the interstices of kindness, romance, gentleness,
perhaps even danger. The walls of the house
contain and define the small bubble
of warm air, surrounded today by winter
bright or summer rain
and that atmosphere in turn encompassed by
universal night and nuclear storms.

None of us are the men we thought
we would become and those of us who had
no thought of who we should become
are most willing to wage war
not even for the ideology, just the simplicity
of doing something that proves we are alive
since the outcome will so easily be the opposite.