The only thing left in the plundered house was the piano: a whale
beached upon an
alien shore, light years away from the seas she once called home.
When they sat
down to play the piano, one numbed finger at a time, the strings still
made music—
only they had now become wings of a dying bird which knew it
would never fly
again. I think of the piano’s loneliness, that desolate, dumb creature
in a house from
which the thieves stole everything, even its memories. Someone said
that the thieves
tried to steal the piano too but they broke their back doing so,
the truth of art too
crushing a weight to bear. And so they left, broken-spined, for a war
that would
ultimately give them nothing in return, for a war which they gave
their all.
In that moment of theft, though, they did not know that; perhaps,
they would never
know.
