A Memo to Martin

You who loved us then

With such gentle fierceness

Will you, can you love us now

When we parade you

With warrior boots

Knowing not what we do?

You who looked beyond our shadows then

Seeing a Promised Land

Will you, can you love us now

When we cast our robotic Predator shadows

Over foreign hills and valleys?

Will you, can you love us now?

You who visited our Main House then

Seeking freedom for your sisters and your brothers

Will you, can you love us now

When we have chosen a brother to live in our Main House

Empowering him to oversee plantations South and North, East and West?

Will you, can you love us now?

You who preached and practiced, lived and died nonviolence

Warning us: “Nonviolence or Nonexistence”

Will you, can you love us now

When we have become what you saw we already were

“the greatest purveyors of violence on the planet”

Will you, can you love us now?

You who then saw the human in us deeper than the inhumane

Offering us hope to become more than we were

Will you, can you love us now

Will you, can you even now offer us hope to become more than we are

Freeing us from captivity to our fear?

Will you, can you love us now?

Peter Ediger