The Archivist's Liturgy
Bring me another coffin. Number 571. The soil has begun to speak— it murmurs in rust, it dreams in bone, it remembers in roots that drink what we cannot name. Fold the flag into a serpent. Let it coil around the silence we mistake for honor. Forget the face— it was too bright for this world of ash. Erase the name— it summoned too many ghosts, and the living have no room for them. Next son lost. The wind has memorized his footsteps, plays them back on winter mornings to mothers who've forgotten how to wake. War is never done— it only changes altars, trades its masks, learns new anthems for the same old hunger. Bring me your son. We'll baptize him in ash and oil. We'll crown him with forgetting, that merciful fog. We'll teach him to sleep beneath thunder, to mistake the drumbeat for a lullaby, to call the darkness duty. Then bring me your daughter. She carries the old fire— the one that burned before we learned to call it glory. Bring me your myths, those stories you whispered when you still believed. We'll feed them to the cannons, let them bloom as smoke. Bring me your lullabies, those tender lies. We'll stitch them into uniforms, into flags that swallow sons. The soil is hungry. It always was. The sky is blind. It has looked away so long it has forgotten what it refused to see. And I— I am the archivist of erasure. I file the screams alphabetically, catalog the silences by weight. I bind the grief in leather, in buckles and brass, in all the bright machinery of forgetting. I whisper to the dust like prayer, like confession, like the only truth left: "Another. Another. Another." Until the shelves collapse. Until the numbers lose their meaning. Until even I forget what I was counting, and why I ever believed the counting mattered. Archivist's Liturgy
Bring me another coffin. Number 571. The soil has begun to speak— it murmurs in rust, it dreams in bone, it remembers in roots that drink what we cannot name. Fold the flag into a serpent. Let it coil around the silence we mistake for honor. Forget the face— it was too bright for this world of ash. Erase the name— it summoned too many ghosts, and the living have no room for them. Next son lost. The wind has memorized his footsteps, plays them back on winter mornings to mothers who've forgotten how to wake. War is never done— it only changes altars, trades its masks, learns new anthems for the same old hunger. Bring me your son. We'll baptize him in ash and oil. We'll crown him with forgetting, that merciful fog. We'll teach him to sleep beneath thunder, to mistake the drumbeat for a lullaby, to call the darkness duty. Then bring me your daughter. She carries the old fire— the one that burned before we learned to call it glory. Bring me your myths, those stories you whispered when you still believed. We'll feed them to the cannons, let them bloom as smoke. Bring me your lullabies, those tender lies. We'll stitch them into uniforms, into flags that swallow sons. The soil is hungry. It always was. The sky is blind. It has looked away so long it has forgotten what it refused to see. And I— I am the archivist of erasure. I file the screams alphabetically, catalog the silences by weight. I bind the grief in leather, in buckles and brass, in all the bright machinery of forgetting. I whisper to the dust like prayer, like confession, like the only truth left: "Another. Another. Another." Until the shelves collapse. Until the numbers lose their meaning. Until even I forget what I was counting, and why I ever believed the counting mattered.