Charlie

A name like Charlie carries with it a lot of weight.

Ten years ago in Paris, a different kind of Charlie made headlines. The blood ran from employees of the magazine Charlie Hebdo, attacked due to the intolerance of French-born Algerian brothers Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi. The satirical cartoons published by the magazine were considered offensive against Islam. People died because others were offended.

Countries like ours that not only believe in the importance and value of free speech, but have embedded that value into America’s laws and founding principles, must continue to protect it. There are those who seek to silence others through fear or intimidation. Like the Kouachi brothers. And like the assassin of another Charlie, here in our own country, an assassin who thought he could end the conversation.

That assassin, an American-born, self indulgent narcissist whose ego got the best of him, cut down Charlie Kirk on a university campus in Utah. Charlie was doing what he loved — interacting with young people who might have a different opinion than his — when the assassin’s bullet ripped through his throat. But that bullet didn’t silence Charlie, it only awakened his disciples.

The misguided assassin who took Charlie’s life, whose actions left a wife and children without a husband and father, was wrong. Neither vengeance nor violence ever wins. And fame is fleeting for a murderer. The assassin’s message gets lost in the grief of a nation, while Charlie’s voice lives on forever.

Mostly Me

Frankly it was summer
and hot.
Air wouldn’t move
and fences were blocked
so no one could enter
even if you didn’t
want to go inside.

I did. I wanted to see
what his world had been like,
all hundred or more years of it.
There he was, a stone general
frozen in thought
astride a white mount
blackened by time.

The pressure
weighed upon him,
I am sure of it.
Please the family,
children need bread,
a new nation cannot breathe
without a leader.

Easy enough to live
on a peaceful farm,
ignore the critics
and haters,
ones who shame
into leadership
those who might win.

Oh, cousin, why did
we fight to defend
a way of life
gone for the ages,
too radical
for our time,
but not yours.

Conflict need come
to an end, they say,
no war between us
or remains of vast
valleys full of blood,
soldiers no more,
only crosses on a hill.

You watch from atop
your loyal stead
new soldiers who
never learned history,
nor learned from it,
mistakes made and
lives lost, teach anew.

They do not listen,
nor will they know
that you remain a leader
teaching lessons from your day,
remind them of wrongs
gone by, not wiped away,
remembered for a reason.

Dear cousin, show them
from your Traveler’s perch
so no one will forget,
that our battles
from home to home,
brother to brother
must surely end.

–Victoria Emmons, 2017