I don’t remember ever hearing Leonard Cohen’s song “The Partisan” before. While we were vacationing for a few days in France, I awoke one morning and asked Apple Music to play songs. It played this one. Before you read on, listen to the song:
It seems Apple Music knew that
I woke up today in St. Malo
(in Brittany in France)
a city bombed to rubble in the war
the Great War
by American bombing
in the months after D-Day
because that was the only way
or so we thought
to take it back from the fascists
from the Nazis
after which surviving residents
refused to build it new from scratch
but loving its very stones and dust
and sifting through to find every reusable brick
rebuilt the place as it had been before
beautiful
as a city joined together to itself
such that I an American
a dweller among people who’ve forgotten
both the cause and the course of the war
the Great War
the perennial war
that comes again and again
upon those who forget its cause and its course
might vacation here
and walk upon its walls
and glimpse a bit of the light
a refracted reflected recalled ray of
all the light we cannot see.
Americans: let’s sort our own fascism
our own Nazism
while we can
because you know we have no Maginot
and no other America will come
to bomb our Nazis out of us
to bomb us out of us
and if one did
survivors could not build our city back
like St. Malo.
Its walls are patrolled day and night against invaders,
but the real danger is wickedness within the city.
—Psalm 55:10, NLT
Written August 12, 2024, in the Hotel Ajoncs d’Or in St. Malo, during a visit inspired by our reading of Anthony Doerr’s hauntingly beautiful novel, All the Light We Cannot See. Revised August 20, 2024, back home in Caledonia, Michigan.
Verba Sparsa 