A lesson well-learned, or…- Reena’s Xploration Challenge # 305

Reena’s Xploration Challenge #305

You are free to use any one or all elements as a muse to write your piece. Bonus points if you can weave the elements together in a theme.

A lesson well-learned, or...

When the war zone is not defined

When the fight is between two agendas

Believers and non-believers

Children, women, old are not spared

How do mothers make their children sleep

What lullaby they sing in the war zone

If at all they can avail this luxury

What role does time play in the war zone

Neither forces them to fight nor stops them

Except for being a mute spectator

Someone between the chaos

keeps busy collecting data

You can never be sure that

How will it be used?

To please the winner, or

For coming generations to take a lesson from it?

” After winning the bloody Kalinga War, the Maurya Emperor Asoka was devastated by the carnage he wrought. Wrecked by remorse he embraced Buddha’s teachings. But he did something else that poets and scholars overlooked.
‘Raise a statue in my likeness,’ he said. ‘And place it in a spot where animals will defecate on my likeness and the lowliest creepers will violate my body. And this will be just. Let history say, behold the Great Asoka who has humbled himself to such treatment in the public’s eye, as atonement for his terrible sins. That will be my lesson well-learned for eternity.’

–Eric Elagen(-Written Words Never Dies)