Elegy in E Harmonic Minor

In 1880, Tchaikovsky composed the Overture of 1812.
It is a composition made famous
by the fact that it uses canon fire to act as instrumentation.
It's played every July 4th here in America,
but if you listen closely
you can hear canon fire covers
in distant deserts;
you can hear sons turn their bodies into crescendos;
cast their xylophone bones into a chorus of shattered silence.
The Middle East may not know western music,
but that's only because they only hear its dissonance
never its resolution
because an accord reached at the end of World War II
diminished holy land held by Palestine
and augmented land exiled from
into a land returned to.

If bodies are temples,
then every suicide bomb bent
on spreading holy organ chords
is just another form of graffiti
that tags blood over open doorways
to tell those around:
Pass over this place.

The trouble with holy land
is that it's only holy
because so many martyrs have buried their beat underneath it.

And somewhere a Palestine father prays
that his son will never elegy himself into an explosion.
Somewhere, a Palestine mother prays
that he child will grow instrument limbs,
that her child will have A sharp lungs and B flat feet
so that hate can't conscript him into its sepulcher.

And somewhere in America, a politician prays that the public
won't listen long enough to remember
that it was we who swung these scales in the first place;
it was we who thought democracy
would sing the right key.

We are not the correct composers
because we still think that the Overture of 1812
with its explosive instrumentation
commemorates us.

It doesn't.

That overture found its voice in 1880
to celebrate a Russian victory,
and that's ironic because the CIA taught a battle hymn of hatred
to Afghanistan when Russia invaded 100 years later.
That hymn still echoes with IEDs rather than canons.

The trouble with never having war on home soil
is we don't have a reason to cease
because we've never had to reap
crops sewn by the flesh of the dead.

We haven't had to hear dissonance's dirge,
and the only coverage our soldiers get
is flags covering their coffins.

I don't know
when our anthem became
the sound of a nation collectively covering its ears,
but there are still measures left.

This song isn't over.

And I don't want anyone
to fear their son becoming
an explosion.


This piece is based off a quote I heard on NPR spoken by a Palestinian man:
"I don't want my son to become a suicide bomber.
I want my son to live.
I want my son to become a musician."