Ink Writes Its Own Elegy

 "Strictly speaking," I told each and every one of them, "I am not mightier than the sword. Never claimed I was, actually. 'Tis the pen -" They shoved their stamps in all the same, and planted me upon the symbol they said would save them from the abyss. Churning deep inside them there must have been, even then, the sickening knowledge: nothing will change because we do this. It is but one more turn of the spinning wheel, to produce another length of the same blood-soaked thread with which the short, troubled history of this nation is woven. Still, they came, forcing themselves out of seven decades of paralysing despair, and folded their green and white rectangles with freshly defibrillated dreams in their eyes. Each ballot inserted into a cheap plastic green or white box rattled and boomed on its way down, until all the boxes were full to overflowing - of so much waste-paper. But the people went blithely forth, like ears of corn tossing their sheaves in the wind, telling themselves that they would manage what their ancestors never had, that they would turn aside the mowing scythe, and flourish. I too began to wonder: could I stand against the bullet, that infinitely viler descendant of the sword, and prevail? The bullet chuckled, so softly then that only I could hear it, though its cackling would resound soon enough throughout the land. "But are you mightier than a quaking human heart," it sneered, "that only wants those it loves to live at any price, and hardens like diamond against the rest of its kind? I take one life, shatter a dozen more, and a million inked thumbs glove themselves in silence." History has fulfilled the prophecy of the bullet. I am nothing, not only here in this land of the lost which was meant to be pure, but in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where they no longer speak of the good. There too, the only question is whether I am to be spilt in the service of the greater or the lesser evil.