Normandy, in Spring

Normandy, 2025

The grass is too green for this kind of memory.

Soft as forgiveness, yes—

but no one here forgets.

Not really.

The bunkers still crouch like wounded things,

gutted by time

but not yet buried.

The sea keeps reaching,

washing nothing away.

I walk where boys

once drowned in their own blood,

sand clinging to their lungs,

calling for mothers

they knew would never come.

The wind here

smells like salt and something older—

like metal,

like memory,

like grief that never fully grew up.

And now—

now we stand in the echo of that war,

while men in suits

line their pockets with ruin.

While tyrants rise again

with better branding.

While flags become fences,

and truth is rationed like bread.

They do not wear swastikas,

but the hunger for power smells the same.

They call it progress.

They call it necessary.

They call it humanitarian—

while selling the bullets.

Somewhere, a child

learns the sound of a drone

before the sound of her own name.

Somewhere, a mother

wipes ash from her baby’s hair.

And we scroll, and sip,

and say we care.

I am here,

in Normandy,

in spring.

And the flowers bloom anyway—

stubborn, exquisite,

indifferent.

I press my hand to the stone

of an unnamed grave,

and whisper,

I am sorry we learned so little.

But some of us are really trying.

The sea keeps reaching.

Not to forgive.

Not to forget.

Just to go on.