I have seen him weep and I have seen him cry and I have seen him in the throws of victory and ecstasy.
Yet,
Yet I look at him now, broken and crippled and old.
And I see sadness in his eyes.
The eyes that have led to victory.
And I see him weep.
privately
quietly
softly.

He thinks no one sees, but I see.

In the midst of the speech, the speech of victory and patriotism, I see him weeping. He thinks no one sees but I see.

I’ve always seen.

Then he is called. He ambles forth, like a man to execution. He reads the words prescribed to him. His lips barely move. Then he stops.
As if to take a breath,
yet he stays a moment longer in silence.
And that moment I see.

We see.
We’ve always seen.

He changes.
He is no longer crippled and lame and useless.
He is fire and light and life.
The words come straight from him.
Not from a lame piece of prose.
And the men behind him gasp in horror.
They think we see, but we see only him.
His mike is cut.
The very vestiges of our era no longer support him.

Yet there he is.
He is the sun and the earth and the stars.
He needs not to be helped by us and our advances.
For he is eternal.

His voice carries.
It travels not by sound
not anymore.
It flows from conciseness to conciseness. Like water to parched earth.
He fills them with things, incredible things.

And the men behind him try to move him, yet he doesn’t see them.
He used to.
He used to bend to their will.
As if they were the wind and him the tree,
Yet in bending he has broken.
And in breaking he is
complete.

He is no longer the tree.
He is the rock and the earth
and the wind can no longer control him.

And then he stops.

And we stop.

We all stop.

Now his shoulders slump and he is now a human again,
with human frailty.
The he does the most unexpected.
He Laughs.

And so they drag him off.
We see him laughing.
They try to make us not see,
to forget.

But we see.
We’ve always seen.

We knew that in that moment we saw
eternity,
we saw it bottled inside a man.
We saw how the world ended,
not with bang
nor whimper
but

with

a

giggle.