The Reluctant Witness
The Intuitive Artist's Workshop
Uncle Sam stands watch at every window, star-spangled, tight-lipped, sworn to see and only sometimes tell. His eagle grips an olive branch and thirteen arrows — never once a tongue.
Seventy-eight years he sat on what he saw before he cracked one drawer of onionskin, sightings from the forties, already ash by the time the light reached us.
Somewhere his own house wrote it down in ink: blind spot — the intelligence, stamped on its own eye, a nation naming the dark and calling that disclosure.
Between '47 and '68, a thousand strangers looked up and lost the word for what they saw. He kept their letters in a drawer marked Bureau, kept the sky. Gave back only paper.
Then, this year: a hundred sixty files loosed all at once like doves with clipped wings — astronaut static, desert light, a war-zone glare — and still the seal beneath it reads: no evidence. No evidence, stacked eye-high, too heavy now to call it nothing.
Congress had to write him a new law just to pry open his own hand — the same ink once spent unsealing a dead president's name.
This is the character of him: not a liar. A vault with a mouth. A red, white, and blue redaction bar, pretending the black ink is the whole flag.
But call him what you like — Sam, the Bureau, the Seal — he was never alone in that room. Something older than any agency already had the file open, never stamped it, never dated it, never needed sixty years and an act of Congress to say what it saw.
The Presence of God does not declassify. It was never classified to begin with. So let Sam keep his boxes, his careful decades, his no evidence — somewhere past every seal he's ever pressed, a truer witness was already testifying, and unlike him, was never sworn reluctant.
~ Pranam ~ OM ~ aMEn ~
7/28/2026, 1:26 p.m.
Add comment
Comments