They never told me where my father is.
They said he died for justice, but what sort of a justice is it when it breaks promises, promises my father made to me, to me, to my mother and to me? This is a cold sort of justice, I say. I say I do not accept it. I do not care, I do not know what the good is, what the glory they said he earned is supposed to do for me. He died.
He died, far away.

They never told me where my father is. I do not know where he is so I can only think – do they know? Is his body miles below the deep aquamarine, settling fleshly against the jagged ocean floor, to be taken apart bit by bit by bit by waves by fish? My father -
is his white skull in the jungle leaf-fall, rotten skin and clots of hair sheaving off in the damp heat?
Are his bones buried beneath the choking dust and ashes of their calamitous works?

What they do know is his name, but I knew it myself.
What they do know is when he died. I knew that too because that was when I woke up screaming panicking in the darkened room; I thrashed like a moth entangled in the spider-webs of its immortal enemy, my mother ran to me, her son, and she knew it too.
What they do know is that he died in glory, for justice, for our country which betrayed us. But I know this, they have told us so many times that it has sunk deep into my pulsing electric neurons: know that your parents, and you too, soon, the sons of the country, shall die for glory and for justice and for your country (though they do not say how they betray us). This all I know.
But what they do not know they have not told me, and I do not know either.
Dearest father, they have taken your image from my mind: they have replaced you, and covered what remains in the spattered blood and burnt nothingness of their lies. I cannot recall any longer who you were, who you have been: they have replaced you the peaceful one, the watchful one, the quiet one, replaced you with the brazen stringent trumpet-calls of their cause. You have been replaced and I cannot find you any longer. And I fear, dear father, dear long-gone father, that they will do the same to me. I fear they will do the same to me, and to the poor sons whom I must kill myself by their command, with the vile fire and twisted lead they shall place in my hands. They call this war, father; they say it was the war that killed you, but I know better, so fear for me, too.

They never told me where you are, father.