Elegy for a Country Once at Peace

There was a morning, once, when we rose unafraid, when dawn came like a friend who knocks at the door, certain of its welcome. We opened our eyes to a country still whole, to the people who had learned, by long and faithful labor, how to live beside each other in the ordinary grace of the uneventful day. Oh, what were we then, who did not know how rare a thing it is to dread so little? The newspaper passed beneath the elm in autumn, and its news was only news, only the slow procession of the known and mild. We received it calmly, the way a still pond receives the rain and settles back to calm.

Now something has fractured in the hour before waking. The morning rises carrying a wordless dread, the way a coming storm is felt before the sky has quite confessed it. We reach toward the day as one reaches toward an old wound, tenderly, expecting pain, finding it, calling it familiar. I mourn thee, country of the unhurried evening, land of the long summer argument resolved by supper and a shared step and the cooling dark. I mourn the town that was various and unafraid, where the man of one faith and the man of another might disagree on heaven and agree on rain, and part as neighbors do, with the wave that is also a small, sufficient form of love.

What elegy is adequate for this, a harmony so gradual in its going that we scarce perceived the hour of its departure? It did not leave in fire or proclamation. It withdrew the way a season withdraws, so slowly that each day seemed ordinary, until we looked and found the landscape changed. Yet something persists in the spirit of the place, in the elder who still tips his hat at dusk, in the child who offers her coat to a stranger, in the two who do not share a language and yet make themselves understood at the crossing. These are the relics of a former gentleness, the ruins through which the original beauty still declares itself, still calls across the years.

Forgive me, then, this grief that is also a longing, for the country that existed, and the country that, in the fidelity of sorrow, we are not yet willing to surrender. To mourn is to insist upon the value of the thing that is gone. And so, I mourn, and I carry it forward, as the living carry the names of the beloved dead, spoken aloud to keep the silence from winning.