Courage: revising the text.

It wasn't uncommon for us kids to be taught that courage was bright and clean, reliable as daylight. Maybe it wore a cape no shame can stain, maybe it faced danger with a bulletproof grin or wielded a bigger gun than the other guys, eyes clear as the thoughtless sky.

And only losers hunched in ash-heaps smoldering and rank, fingering the octaves of their losses in tatters of regret at twilight.

And so by the time we'd sprouted beards or breasts and, at an hour not on our childhood clocks, nuzzled the one with the other a time or two, we knew ourselves for the cowards we were becoming, and geared for a long haul cobbled with the boulders of loss and pebbles of minor compensation, no longer searching our mirrors for heroes.

But years require revisions in the heart's first text now don't they, so we recast the characters and plot not as we imagined them but as they've come to be. Just now I think of Smilovic, the Croat cellist, refugee among refugees in a cave above Sarajevo, bumming smokes and brandy shamelessly all afternoon from his NPR interviewer, and how, at twilight, seated among dozens of strangers he shifts, taking up his bow to perform in that darkness which is history and fear, how his sweetly drawn music manifests an order resonant with beauty, yes, but nuanced, too, with memories barbed by hope and all the anguish of an audience geared hard to survival now, scarred by murder, rape, and the forced witness of degradation no heart withstands unbroken.

As I listen I am hushed by hard news of this one's fate, by the image of him sitting on the heaped ashes of a library playing at first alone and for himself so that the enemy would know the spirit of a people lives, and is not silenced --not by flame, bomb, bullet, or brutality that seems to know no end; alone he sat there calling forth music and the crowd that gathered listened as he played until at last they sang, giving ashen silence a new name that cannot be translated without flame.