Angels must be confused by war. Both sides praying for protection, yet someone always gets hurt. Someone dies. Someone cries so deep they lose their watery state. Angels must be confused by war. Who can they help? Who can they clarify? Whose mercy do they cast to the merciless? No modest scream can be heard. No stainless pain can be felt. All is clear to angels except in war. When I awoke to this truth it was from a dream I had last night. I saw two angels conversing in a field of children's spirits rising like silver smoke. The angels were fighting among themselves about which side was right and which was wrong. Who started the conflict? Suddenly, the angels stilled themselves like a stalled pendulum, and they shed their compassion to the rising smoke of souls who bore the watermark of war. They turned to me with those eyes from God's library, and all the pieces fallen were raised in unison, coupled like the breath of flames in a holy furnace. Nothing in war comes to destruction, but the illusion of separateness. I heard this spoken so clearly I could only write it down like a forged signature. I remember the compassion, mountainous, proportioned for the universe. I think a tiny fleck still sticks to me like gossamer threads from a spider's web. And now, when I think of war, I flick these threads to all the universe hoping they stick on others as they did me. Knitting angels and animals to the filamental grace of compassion. The reticulum of our skyward home.