A Final Question

What will people read on your funerary marker?


Surely, Vladimir Putin knows that he will someday die. Surely, he knows that a human judgment of his life—if not a divine judgment—awaits. Surely, he knows that such human judgment is for some as final and immutable as a divine judgment. It can be written in stone: 


Here lies old Vlad.
Some say he was bad.
But in his mind
Vlad couldn’t find
Bad in what he left behind.
It’s always thus,
For leaders who
Won’t discuss
What they do.


Surely, Vlad knows that all those dead Russians, some tens of thousands of them who died in Ukraine in an unprovoked war, will be the legacy he leaves, win or lose the war he started. Surely, Vlad knows his legacy will lie for years to come in hatred and vengeance directed at his own people. But if he surely knows, it never shows. Maybe this is what he’s aiming for:


The dead pile up as they always do
When war’s the mission of a few
Who seek to conquer and control
Every battered living soul.


Surely, as the war continues and costs pile up, Vlad knows his goals have to change. If not, his epitaph will be:


Vladimir Putin, would-be Caesar,
Never known as an appeaser,
Invaded lands he thought were Russia’s
And in so doing made Russia Prussia.


And you? What would you have us write?

My name is _______, and in my life
I never started any strife.