Years I’ve waited. When you left to join the Achaean forces on their first expedition to Troy to save a woman whose face launched a thousand ships and a thousand killer spears, I waited. When you joined Suleiman II’s army to maintain the Ottoman Empire throughout the Persian frontier, I waited. You took on the Incan Empire at Cajamarca with Francisco Pizarro and opened South America’s doors to Spain; I waited. The French Revolution erupted in 1789 and you spent decades alongside Napoleon achieving victories and valiance, and I waited. You groaned upon Maryland’s fields in the battle of Antietam, the reddest day in American history, and still I waited. When you rallied against the German Nazis on the Eastern Front and spilt your blood in the Volga River, I was waiting for you. (more…)

In a chilling poem of simple yet intense metaphors, the internationally-beloved poet Constantine Cavafy illuminates—quite literally—the scope of one’s life in the spectrum of candlelight. He explains how the days of our future burn before us like a bright line of candles. Similarly, the days of our past are a line of extinguished candles behind us, cold and melted and broken and some of them still smoking. Sad, haunting forms; ghosts of what was and what could have been.
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