Iraq War Grief Daily Witness

Please go to BagNewsNotes

2008-01-15T18:40:00.001-08:00

Michael Shaw's outstanding blog, BagNewsNotes, is featuring the work of photojournalist Lori Grinker.

Michael writes:

In response to an inattentive domestic media and the lack of visual documentation, Lori Grinker has been pursuing the story of Iraqi civilians fleeing the war.
In April, and again in September 2007, she traveled to Amman to photograph Iraqis forced to leave their families, homes and livelihoods for a life of cramped, substandard living conditions, inactivity, and waiting for the time when it will be safe to return to Iraq, or hear that they have found sanctuary in another country. And those are the “lucky” ones. Many of her subjects are in Amman to repair their bodies, only to be to be repatriated to a war zone after they are “healed.”
In the case above, the young man (call him Amer) was burned in an explosion while walking past a fuel truck in Baghdad. We see the 16-year old coming out of the recovery room after having surgery to fix the contracted fingers on his right hand. He faced the same surgery on his left hand a couple of month later.

I encourage you to see Lori's work being featured at 'The Bag,' as well as at her own site.

He Wrote His Own Obituary

2008-01-05T19:23:00.000-08:00

I learned about the death of Army Major Andrew Olmsted today in a diary by taylormattd at Daily Kos. Olmsted posted as G'Kar at the blog, Obsidian Wings, contributed to the Rocky Mountain News blog, and for a time maintained his own blog.

I had not heard of him or his work until today.

Olmsted penned his own obituary of sorts, parting words left with a friend to post on his behalf in the event of his death.

Here's one of the things he wrote:

I do ask (not that I'm in a position to enforce this) that no one try to use my death to further their political purposes. I went to Iraq and did what I did for my reasons, not yours. My life isn't a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side. If you think the U.S. should stay in Iraq, don't drag me into it by claiming that somehow my death demands us staying in Iraq. If you think the U.S. ought to get out tomorrow, don't cite my name as an example of someone's life who was wasted by our mission in Iraq. I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I'm not around to expound on them I'd prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn't support. Further, this is tough enough on my family without their having to see my picture being used in some rally or my name being cited for some political purpose. You can fight political battles without hurting my family, and I'd prefer that you did so.

I honor Andrew Olmsted's request, because I believe that what he also wrote next is wholly consistent with the purpose of my own small and poorly-traveled blog:

...for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven't known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war. Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I'm facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn't have a sense of humor?
But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it's a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision. Because it is pretty clear that the average American would not have supported the Iraq War had they known the costs going in. I am far too cynical to believe that any future debate over war will be any less vitriolic or emotional, but perhaps a few more people will realize just what those costs can be the next time.

Iraq War Grief - Ave Maria

2007-12-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria" is one of the most familiar tunes in the classical and sacred music genres. It's also one of those pieces of music that is very easy to do badly - heavy on schmaltz and saccharine sentimentality.

The version that accompanies this YouTube compilation of photos in Iraq and elsewhere is performed by Arthur Grumiaux (violin) and Istvan Hajdu (piano), and appears on the Christmas compilation, The Ultimate Relaxation Christmas Album.

While I never would have chosen that album (my wife bought it upon the recommendation of her sister, who's a big Mantovani fan), I think this rendition of Ave Maria is just about the best I've ever heard. I offer it now as a holiday prayer and gift to you, in the Christian tradition. Dedicated to all who suffer because of war.

Ave Maria (Salutatio Angelica), is a traditional Catholic and Orthodox church prayer calling for the intercession of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Rooted mainly in Biblical texts, the Ave Maria developed in the Middle Ages; in this context, Mary is known as the Blessed Virgin. The prayer is also used by other denominations in the Catholic tradition, notably Anglo-Catholic members of the Anglican Communion. In the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, it is known as the "Angelic Salutation" as well as being called the Hail Mary.

Ave Maria by Schubert was originally titled “Ellens dritter Gesang” (Ellen's third song). The confusion over the title probably arose due to the opening verse of the song:

Ave Maria! Maiden mild!
Listen to a maiden's prayer!....

The words to Ave Maria song were taken from Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake and Adam Storck wrote the German translation Schubert used. The person responsible for setting the Ave Maria lyrics in Latin remains a mystery to this day.

Walter Scott's Original
from "The Lady of the Lake"

Ave Maria! maiden mild!
Listen to a maiden's prayer!
Thou canst hear though from the wild,
Thou canst save amid despair.
Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,
Though banish'd, outcast and reviled -
Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer;
Mother, hear a suppliant child!
Ave Maria!

Ave Maria! undefiled!
The flinty couch we now must share
Shall seem this down of eider piled,
If thy protection hover there.
The murky cavern's heavy air
Shall breathe of balm if thou hast smiled;
Then, Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer;
Mother, list a suppliant child!
Ave Maria!

Ave Maria! stainless styled!
Foul demons of the earth and air,
From this their wonted haunt exiled,
Shall flee before thy presence fair.
We bow us to our lot of care,
Beneath thy guidance reconciled;
Hear for a maid a maiden's prayer,
And for a father hear a child!
Ave Maria!

source

Note: When you open this page, a rendition of the Latin lyrics accomapanied by a new-age synthesizer automatically loads and plays. If that arrangement is not to your liking, you can either turn it off entirely with the small playback controls in the Flash player at the upper right of the page, or skip to the more traditional versions 2, 3, or 4 on the list below the controls.

I hope you'll also take some time to browse this music site, which offers a wonderful selection of sacred music from the Russian and Ukrainian choral traditions. I purchased the MP3 download version of the album - Praise and Worship Music by The Monk Choir of Kiev Pechersk Monastery

Iraq War Grief - In the Valley of Elah

2007-09-11T15:54:00.000-07:00

I have my good friend, Ilona, to thank, because she urged me to attend a late night movie screening at YearlyKos 2007.

I had attended plenty of conference-wide meetings, workshops, and social events by the time I found the small room where the screening was taking place, and the twenty or so people there had already seen several short films and trailers before I arrived. The soda bottles were mostly empty, and the few remaining pizza slices were cold, but I combined several sugared and diet brands into one large cupful, scooped up wedges of plain, roasted pepper, and barbecued chicken pizza – I'm not shy in matters of food – and took my seat.

One of the people involved in the movie's production spoke for a few minutes before loading a DVD into a Mac notebook connected to a projector. There were no opening credits or music, and the legend “Property of Warner Brothers Pictures” appeared across the bottom of the screen for the entire time.

The initial sound and picture quality were poor, and several folks worked to switch machines and reconfigure the various cables and connections for a much better presentation.

Ilona told me the movie was based on an event that appears in her PTSD timeline at ePluribus Media: the 2003 story of Army Specialist Richard Davis. Davis was stabbed to death, and his body burned, after he and several of his colleagues were kicked out of a strip club near Fort Benning, GA. The men had fought together in Iraq as members of the 3^rd Infantry Division.

Davis' murder highlighted what critics called the Army's lack of attention to the severe psychiatric problems affecting some soldiers as a result of their combat experiences. Private Jacob Burgoyne, one of the men present when Davis was murdered, had been diagnosed with severe PTSD in Kuwait, and medical officials there had taken away his gun, put him on suicide watch, and said that he should be escorted directly to the base psychiatric unit upon his return to Fort Benning.

Instead, Burgoyne had a brief meeting with a counselor before being released. Davis was murdered four days later.

Here's one plot synopsis from a review by Boyd van Hoeij:

Tommy Lee Jones’s handsomely aged parchment over bones face perfectly fits the role of Hank Deerfield, a stern retired army veteran. Deerfield’s second son Mike has not reported back home even though his army unit returned to base from duty in Iraq, worrying Hank and his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon in a thankless role) to the point of Hank’s departure for some private investigating, convinced that the army and police are not up to the task. After finding little information at the army base itself, he turns to Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron, convincing) from the local police force close to the army base, who reluctantly helps him...

The story unfolds as a traditional murder mystery, with Jones' and Theron's characters doing the legwork.

I had two thoughts upon seeing the film.

One was in response to a device that the director used to convey the idea that we can ever fully see or understand what someone else has gone through, even when that person is as close as our own child, and even when the events are as shared as one soldier's war is known to another. We can, at best, only begin to glimpse small parts of another's experience; and even when we do, those glimpses are distorted by noise and obscured by our own distance and removal. Our understanding is always incomplete.

Jones' character learns about his son's Iraq experiences through a series of video fragments painstakingly recovered from the young man's damaged cell phone. The sounds and images are filled with static, and each fragment is like a single piece from a big puzzle – not very helpful by itself, and once obtained still needing to be linked with other pieces into a more understandable whole. Or not, when so many other pieces just never turn up.

That metaphor resonates with me. I've never been in the military, and though I've spent my professional life working in and near hospitals, I've so far avoided the remaining two places that I long ago vowed to steer clear of – prison, and war.

So the best I can ever hope to understand about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and about what the men and women from all sides are suffering as a result, is incompletely, by looking for the available fragments, and assembling them as best I can, all the while knowing that I'll never see the whole puzzle.

My other thought was simpler: “Wingnuts are going to go crazy, even though most won't bother to see this film.”

Here are some samples from a review by a wingnut who apparently has seen it:

Paul Haggis has decided to tackle the quagmire that is the Middle-East. By now it’s been done to death on film by other liberal drumbeaters, but Haggis’s anti-war movie does the anti-Iraq salsa with a twist: it takes place on American soil.

SNIP

(Haggis' message is simply)...we’re cranking out thousands of Jeffrey Dahmers by sending our boys over there. I’m not overstating here, that’s really the message of Haggis’s movie...

SNIP

...by the time the movie’s half over, the mystery is already solved and the rest of the film’s running time is spent with Hank trying to come to grips with what’s happened till the movie’s political pontificating eventually boils over and overshadows everything until we’re left with a film that can only be described as un-American.

There, I said it. In the Valley of Elah isn’t just heavy-handed and preachy, it’s downright un-American. Not because it comes out pretty clearly against the Iraq war or because it paints American troops as sadistic monsters...In the Valley of Elah is un-American because it takes a patriot, in the form of Hank Deerfield, and shreds him.

By the end of the movie, our overly patriotic father-hero has abandoned whatever it is that he loved about America in the first place and it’s pretty clear that he hates just about everything his country stands for. More importantly, Haggis seems to think he’s pretty justified in doing it and I got the sense that we’re supposed to feel the same way too. If that’s not un-American then I don’t know what is. Lucky for Haggis, free speech covers even that, but that doesn’t mean we have to like it. He reduces America’s problems to a series of slanders and then hangs a flag upside down just to bully home the point.

The movie opens in limited cities this Friday, the 14th; and nationwide on September 21. I hope you'll see it, and put the pieces together for yourself.

Thanks for getting me to go to the screening, Ilona.

The official movie site
Review, stills, links, and more at Rotten Tomatoes

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 74

2007-08-28T08:46:00.001-07:00

top An unidentified woman holds a young boy during the burial service for Army Sgt. Scott Lange Kirkpatrick, Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007, at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. Kirkpatrick, 26, of Reston, Va., was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga., and was killed during an ambush in Arab Jabour, Iraq, Saturday, Aug. 11, 2007.
(AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

bottom U.S. Major General Sean Byrne (L) presents a flag to Martha Kirkpatrick (2nd R), the mother of U.S. Army Sgt Lange Kirkpatrick who died August 11, 2007 during an ambush in Iraq, during his burial ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, August 23, 2007. Alongside are Sgt Kirkpatrick's widow Christy (3rd R) and his father Edward Kirkpatrick (R).
REUTERS/Jason Reed (UNITED STATES)

- - -

Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind--

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--

A poem should not mean

But be.

- - -

What has been bothering me this whole deployment is the brevity and formality in which the media handles the death of soldiers. It always goes, “PFC John Smith, Norman, Oklahoma, killed by enemy small arms fire in Baghdad. Assigned to 1/43 Engineers, Third Infantry Division.”

What a crock to read that in a paper. It would be wholly appropriate to dedicate a full color photo and a real biography in every paper in America. The anonymity of dead soldiers would evaporate and the public would be forced to look at the faces of the fallen. Would it set in progress change? Perhaps. It certainly would go to show that we’re out here every day, dying for an ideal long forgotten.

from the entry “Stupid Shit of The Deployment Awards!”
at the blog Army of Dude

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 73

2007-08-02T04:51:00.001-07:00

Sgt. Bruce Harrington, from Buzzards Bay, Mass., comforts his wife Sheila Harrington following a deployment ceremony for the Rhode Island Army National Guard's 169th Military Police Company in Warren, R.I., Thursday, July 5, 2007. Harrington, on his first tour, will be training Iraqi police with the rest of the 169th M.P. Company. (AP Photo/Stew Milne)

Somebody to Hold
from the movie version of the musical Hair
lyrics/music/book by James Rado and Gerome Ragni

The saddest story ever told oh Lord,
Oh, where do I begin?
The saddest story ever told oh Lord, is what might have been.

I left you my dear, now I regret it,
The way in time my heart will come to forget it.
Well, I've got to have somebody to hold, oh Lord,
I've got to have somebody to hold.

Lost without you with no tears left to cry,
Oh, my darlin' child I'll simply pine away,
And I,
I will simply pine away and die.
I'll pine away and die.

The saddest story ever told oh Lord,
Oh, where do I begin?
The saddest story ever told oh Lord, is what might have been.

Down about my ears, the sky is falling,
And through all the tragedy can't you hear me calling.

Well, I've got to have somebody to hold oh Lord,
I've got to have somebody, got to be bold.
I'm cryin' out in the cold
We'll I've got to have somebody to hold,
I've got to have somebody to hold.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 72

2007-07-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

Young Iraqi girl stands next to a bullet hole in the area where clashes erupted between the US military and the Mahdi Army militia, in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala, 27 July. Nine people were killed and several more were wounded during the clashes, security and hospital officials said.
(AFP/Mohammed Sawaf)

Easy to Be Hard
from the musical Hair
lyrics/music/book by James Rado and Gerome Ragni

How can people be so heartless
How can people be so cruel
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who care about evil
And social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend

How can people be so heartless
You know I'm hung up on you
Easy to give in
Easy to help out

And especially people
Who care about strangers
Who say they care about social injustice
Do you only
Care about the bleeding crowd
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend

How can people have no feelings
How can they ignore their friends
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no

- - -

I've been listening to this music again after a long hiatus, prompted, in part, by the recent John Edwards campaign commercial. I was first given a vinyl LP of the original Broadway cast recording as a graduation gift in 1969 by a friend of my older sister's. It changed my life. I guess I'm just a good DFH ;^)

- - -

Update: Thanks to Diane W. at MyLeftWing for this YouTube.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 71

2007-07-26T13:48:00.001-07:00

top photo Mohammed Ali, 17, waits to be transported to a burn center after a car bomb attack in the Karradah neighborhood in central Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 23, 2007. Three parked cars exploded in a predominantly Shiite area in Baghdad on Monday, killing at least 12 people and wounding 19, police said.
(AP Photo/Adil al-Khazali)

middle photo The casket of U.S. Army Pfc. Le Ron Wilson is carried into his funeral at Christ the King Church in New York July 17, 2007. Wilson, 18, from New York, died July 6, 2007, in Iraq of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle.
(Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

bottom photo This April 2007 handout photo provided by ATK Corporate Communications shows Lake City Army Ammunition Plant Vice President and General Manager Karen Davies. The plant produces nearly 1.4 billion bullets a year, a dizzying figure driven by war demands. Although no one knows when the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will end, the ammunition industry is preparing for a downturn in business, hoping to avoid a post-Cold War style drop-off that forced some to close doors.
(AP Photo/ATK Corporate Communications)

- - -

Three-Five-Zero-Zero
from the musical Hair

Ripped open by metal explosion
Caught in barbed wire
Fireball
Bullet shock
Bayonet
Electricity
Shrapnel
Throbbing meat
Electronic data processing
Black uniforms
Bare feet, carbines
Mail-order rifles
Shoot the muscles
256 Viet Cong captured
256 Viet Cong captured

Prisoners in Niggertown
It's a dirty little war
Three Five Zero Zero
Take weapons up and begin to kill
Watch the long long armies drifting home

- - -

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 70

2007-07-13T09:45:00.000-07:00

(top)Recent file photo of Reuters driver Saeed Chmagh who was killed with photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen in Baghdad on Thursday. The cause of the deaths was unclear, though first reports from the scene spoke of an explosion.
(Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters)

(bottom)Recent file photo of Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 23, who was killed along with driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, in Baghdad on July 12, 2007.
(Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters)

from Endymion
by John Keats

Book I (excerpt)

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 69

2007-07-12T18:04:00.000-07:00

The mother of 20-year-old Mohammed Hasson cries over his body in the holy Shiite city of Najaf, Iraq, Wednesday, July 4, 2007. Mohammed was killed in a car bomb blast in the Baghdad's Shaab district Tuesday. (AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani)

from A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 68

2007-07-11T11:49:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Moretti, right, sister of U.S. Army Sgt. Trista Moretti, embraces a U.S. flag given to her at Sgt. Moretti's burial Tuesday, July 3, 2007, in Linden, N.J. At left is their mother, Judy Moretti. Sgt. Moretti was killed in an insurgent mortar attack June 25 in Nasir Lafitah, Iraq.
(AP Photo/George Olivar)

from Heart's Needle
by W. D. Snodgrass

7

Here in the scuffled dust
is our ground of play.
I lift you on your swing and must
shove you away,
see you return again,
drive you off again, then

stand quiet till you come.
You, though you climb
higher, farther from me, longer,
will fall back to me stronger.
Bad penny, pendulum,
you keep my constant time

to bob in blue July
where fat goldfinches fly
over the glittering, fecund
reach of our growing lands.
Once more now, this second,
I hold you in my hands.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 67

2007-07-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

A four year old Iraq child cries as older boys stage a mock execution in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 2, 2007. Children's games are under a heavy influence of ongoing violence in the country, one of the more popular ones being a clash between militias and police.
(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Happy Ending for the Lost Children
by Charles Martin

One of their picture books would no doubt show
The two lost children wandering in a maze
Of anthropomorphic tree limbs: the familiar crow

Swoops down upon the trail they leave of corn,
Tolerant of the error of their ways.
Hand in hand they stumble onto the story,

Brighteyed with beginnings of fever, scared
Half to death, yet never for a moment
Doubting the outcome that had been prepared

Long in advance: Girl saves brother from oven,
Appalling witch dies in appropriate torment;
Her hoarded treasure buys them their parents' love.

* * *
"As happy an ending as any fable
Can provide," squawks the crow, who had expected more:
Delicate morsels from the witch's table.

It's an old story—in the modern version
The random children fall to random terror.
You see it nightly on the television:

Cameras focus on the lopeared bear
Beside the plastic ukulele, shattered
In a fit of rage—the lost children are

Found in the first place we now think to look:
Under the fallen leaves, under the scattered
Pages of a lost children's picture book.

* * *
But if we leave terror waiting in the rain
For the wrong bus, or if we have terror find,
At the very last moment the right train,

Only to get off at the wrong station—
If we for once imagine a happy ending,
Which is, as always, a continuation,

It's because the happy ending's a necessity,
It isn't just a sentimental ploy"
Without the happy ending there would be

No one to tell the story to but the witch,
And the story is clearly meant for the girl and boy
Just now about to step into her kitchen

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 66

2007-07-07T21:36:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted anything in a long time and decided that, rather than go ahead with a long and tortured explanation of why it's been so these last several weeks, I'd put this up instead, and try to get back on track.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 65

2007-06-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

An Iraqi Christian woman holds her rosary during prayers, in 2005. A Chaldaean Catholic priest and three of his assistants were shot dead on Sunday outside a church in northern Iraq, the local police commander said.
(AFP/File/Sabah Arar)

God lay dead in heaven
by Stephen Crane

God lay dead in heaven;
Angels sang the hymn of the end;
Purple winds went moaning,
Their wings drip-dripping
With blood
That fell upon the earth.
It, groaning thing,
Turned black and sank.
Then from the far caverns
Of dead sins
Came monsters, livid with desire.
They fought,
Wrangled over the world,
A morsel.
But of all sadness this was sad —
A woman's arms tried to shield
The head of a sleeping man
From the jaws of the final beast.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 64

2007-05-29T08:58:00.001-07:00

A photo of and boots representing Private Sean Silva sit among more than 3,400 pairs of combat boots, one pair for every U.S. soldier killed in the Iraq War, displayed as part of "Eyes Wide Open: An Exhibition on the Human Cost of the Iraq War" in Chicago, May 25, 2007. The traveling exhibition will remain in Chicago until May 28. REUTERS/John Gress (UNITED STATES)

A special dedication today to all in Congress who voted to continue unconditional funding for the occupation of Iraq.

I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag
words and music by Joe McDonald
(with minor lyric changes by RubDMC)

Come on all of you big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Iraqnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.

Chorus
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Iraqnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

Come on generals, let's move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go kill ‘em in their beds —
‘Cuz the only good Iraqi is the one that's dead
You know that peace can only be won
When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come.

Chorus

Come on Halliburton, don't move slow,
Why man, this is war au-go-go.
There's plenty good money to be made
Supplying the Army with the tools of the trade,
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it all on Iraqnam.

Chorus

Come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Iraqnam.
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send your daughters off before it's too late.
You can be the first one on your block
To have your kids come home in a box.

Chorus

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 63

2007-05-28T04:46:00.000-07:00

image from iCasualties.org

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning forks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more.

Isaiah 2:4

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 62

2007-05-12T10:54:00.000-07:00

Crazy
by Gnarls Barkley

I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions had an echo
And so much space
And when you're out there
Without care,

Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much

Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly

And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that's my only advice

Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do you think you are,
Ha ha ha bless your soul
You really think you're in control

Well, I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
Just like me

My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember is thinking, I wanna be like them
Ever since I was little, ever since I was little it looked like fun
And it's no coincidence I've come
And I can die when I'm done

But Maybe I'm crazy
Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Probably

- - -

a personal note: I’ve hardly posted any of these diaries in the past several weeks. I’ll explain more about why in a while, when I figure that out for myself. In the meantime, this song has had a strong hold on me.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness - Day 61

2007-05-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

a personal note: I haven't posted in two weeks. I'll explain more in a later post.
Thanks, RubDMC

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 60

2007-04-18T02:47:00.000-07:00

top photo

Relatives of Samir Sabah Michael, an Iraqi Christian killed in yesterday's road side bomb blast, cry over his body in Kirkuk, Iraq, Friday, April 13, 2007. Samir's was supposed to get married Friday.

(AP Photo/Emad Matti)

bottom photo

During a steady rain, Colin Kennedy, youngest brother of Army Sgt. Adam Kennedy, kisses Adam goodby after everyone else left the grave site in Norfolk, Mass., Tuesday, April 17, 2007. Kennedy, 25, was killed on Sunday, April 8, 2007, by the blast from an improvised explosive device south of Baghdad, Iraq.
(AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

J. S. Bach: F# Minor Toccata
by Bill Holm

This music weeps, not for sin
but rather for the black fact
that we must all die, but not one
of us knows what comes after.
This music leaps from key to key
as if it had no clear place to arrive,
making up its life, one bar at a time.
But when you come at last to the real theme,
strict, inexorable, and bleak,
you must play it slow and sad,
with melancholy dignity, or you miss
all its grim wisdom.
In three pages, it says, the universe collapses,
and you--still only halfway home.

Grief Daily Witness Day 59

2007-04-16T15:08:00.000-07:00

Injured occupants are carried out of Norris Hall at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., Monday, April 16, 2007. A gunman opened fire in a dorm and classroom on the campus, killing at least 30 people in the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. history. The gunman is killed but it's unclear if he was shot by police or took his own life.
(AP Photo/The Roanoke Times, Alan Kim)

Ghost Notes (an excerpt)
by Ralph Burns

for Danny Fletcher

I. Call and Response

It's beauty people fear, bright

rose riding on Aunt Billie's forehead,

the way light makes green everything

after her pickled okra, stubble

in the hands of day labor, callouses

of a parade of things and

touching them without seeing

or hearing without knowledge,

dumbstruck by a brooding need to define

or look without a place

to grieve, beauty and not faith

in truth in the light of justice --

just reach and nothing's there

but what's there already.

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 58

2007-04-15T07:44:00.000-07:00

The mother, widow, and father of U.S. Army soldier Jason Nunez watch from a distance under a tree as the soldier's coffin is lowered into a grave, about a week after he was killed in a bomb attack in Iraq, at the military cemetery in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, Wednesday, April 4, 2007. Their names are, left to right, Marlene Fernandez, Nitza Damaris Martnez, and Samuel Nuez.
(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

I am the People, the Mob
by Carl Sandburg

I am the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and
clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me
and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons
and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing.
Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out
and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes
me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history
to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the
lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year,
who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the
world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his
voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 57

2007-04-13T14:54:00.000-07:00

Girls look through a fence at a refugee camp in Mosul April 5, 2007. About 250 families moved from Tal Afar town to camps in Mosul since last weeks' violence attacks.
REUTERS/Khaled al-Mousuly (IRAQ)

Tuesday
words/music by Kent Lambert (aka Roommate)

The war will start on Monday
we will go to work
we will read the headlines
we will go get coffee.

The war will start on Monday
we will talk to God
or maybe not
we will go get lunch.

Maybe we'll eat pasta
maybe we'll eat pork
maybe we'll eat tofu
maybe we'll eat crow
maybe we'll eat crow.

The war will start on Monday
we will watch the clock
we'll go to the protest
or maybe not
or maybe not.

The war will start on Monday
we will watch TV
we will change the channels
we will go to sleep
and in our dreams we'll drop the bombs and stop the bleeding
in our dreams we'll write the songs that start the healing
in our dreams we'll find another way
and the war will end on Tuesday.

- - -

Roommate’s website
(including mp3 of the featured song)

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 56

2007-04-11T08:40:00.000-07:00

A boy cries in a newly opened orphanage in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City In Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, April 2, 2007. The orphanage houses 33 Iraqi children who lost their parents during the four year of conflict in Iraq.
(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Fishing in Winter
by Ralph Burns

A man staring at a small lake sees
His father cast light line out over
The willows. He's forgotten his
Father has been dead for two years
And the lake is where a blue fog
Rolls, and the sky could be, if it
Were black or blue or white,
The backdrop of all attention.

He wades out to join the father,
Following where the good strikes
Seem to lead. It's cold. The shape
Breath takes on a cold day is like
Anything else--a rise on a small lake,
The Oklahoma hills, blue scrub—
A shape already inside a shape,
Two songs, two breaths on the water.

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 55

2007-04-06T14:36:00.000-07:00

An Iraqi man is questioned by U.S. Army soldiers after they found an illegal ammunition magazine in his house in Baghdad April 4, 2007.
REUTERS/Bob Strong (IRAQ)

The Death Poem
by Jumah al-Dossari

Take my blood.

Take my death shroud and

The remnants of my body.

Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,

To the judges and

To the people of conscience,

Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,

Of this innocent soul.

Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,

Of this wasted, sinless soul,

Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the "protectors of peace."

- - -

Thanks to Rippen Kitten for a diary at Daily Kos about the poetry written by several prisoners being held without charge at Guantanamo.

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

- - -

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 54

2007-04-05T12:50:00.000-07:00

Allana Swiger, widow of Army Sgt. Jason Swiger, watches as the casket is loaded into a hearse following the funeral, Wednesday, April 4, 2007, in Portland, Maine. Swiger was killed by a suicide bomber March 25 in Baqubah, Iraq.
(AP Photo/Joel Page)

Mr. Lonely
words/music by Bobby Vinton and Gene Allan

Lonely, I'm Mr. Lonely
I have nobody for my own
I am so lonely, I'm Mr. Lonely
Wish I had someone to call on the phone

Now I'm a soldier, a lonely soldier
Away from home through no wish of my own
That's why I'm lonely, I'm Mr. Lonely
I wish that I could go back home

Letters, never a letter
I get no letters in the mail
I've been forgotten, yes, forgotten
Oh how I wonder, how is it I failed

Now I'm a soldier, a lonely soldier
Away from home through no wish of my own
That's why I'm lonely, I'm Mr. Lonely
I wish that I could go back home

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 53

2007-04-04T11:31:00.000-07:00

This videograb taken from footage obtained 2 April by the SITE Institute, a group monitoring radical Islamist websites, shows German hostage Hannelore Krause (R), 61, and her 20-year-old son Sinan, crying as she appeals to her country and Austria for help. Germany has condemned the video as their Iraqi kidnappers threatened to execute them unless Berlin withdraws its troops from Afghanistan.
(AFP/SITE Institute)

He Foretells His Passing
by F. D. Reeve

I can imagine, years from now, your coming back
to this high, old, white house. ”Home” I shouldn’t say
because we can’t predict who’ll live here with a different
name.
How tall the birches will be then. Will you look up
from the road past the ash for light in the study windows
upstairs and down? Go climb the black maple as first
in new sneakers you walked forty feet in air
and saw the life to come. Don’t forget the cats.

Because you grow away from a house, no matter how much you
come back,
if the people you love are elsewhere, or if the reason is,
say,
nostalgia, don’t worry about small changes or lost names.
Sit down for a minute under the tallest birch. Look up
at the clouds reflected in the red barn’s twisted window.
Lean on the wall. Hear our voices as at first
they shook the plaster, laughed, then burned in the dry air
like a wooden house. I imagine you won’t forget the cats.

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 52

2007-04-03T11:46:00.000-07:00

(left) U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) (2nd L) and armed escorts visit the Shorga marketplace and interact with local merchants while walking the streets of Baghdad April 1, 2007 with General David Petraeus, U.S. Commander in Iraq (not pictured). Photo taken April 1, 2007.
REUTERS/Sergeant Matthew Roe/10th Public Affairs Operations Center/Handout (IRAQ). EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS.

(right) Soldiers salute as an honor guard carries the coffin containing the body of U.S. Army soldier Jason Nunez Fernandez, after his remains were returned to his native Puerto Rico, at Muniz Airbase in Carolina, Monday, April 2, 2007. Fernandez, of the 82nd Airborne Division, was killed last week along with three fellow soldiers in a suicidal bomb attack against his convoy near Baqubah, Iraq.
(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
by Oscar Wilde

In Reading gaol by Reading town

  There is a pit of shame,

And in it lies a wretched man

  Eaten by teeth of flame,

In burning winding-sheet he lies,

  And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead,

  In silence let him lie:

No need to waste the foolish tear,

  Or heave the windy sigh:

The man had killed the thing he loved,

  And so he had to die.

And all men kill the thing they love,

  By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

  Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

  The brave man with a sword!

- - -

April is National Poetry Month

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 51

2007-04-01T13:06:00.000-07:00

Bodies of victims of violence are seen on the floor of a hospital morgue in Kirkuk, about 250 km (150 miles) north of Baghdad, April 1, 2007. Violence in Iraq killed 1,861 civilians in March, a 13 percent increase from the previous month and despite a major security crackdown in Baghdad, Iraqi government tallies showed on Sunday.
REUTERS/Slahaldeen Rasheed (IRAQ)

Posthumous Remorse
by Charles Baudelaire
translated by Keith Waldrop

When you go to sleep, my gloomy beauty, below a black marble monument, when from alcove and manor you are reduced to damp vault and hollow grave;

when the stone—pressing on your timorous chest and sides already lulled by a charmed indifference—halts your heart from beating, from willing, your feet from their bold adventuring,

then the tomb, confidant to my infinite dream (since the tomb understands the poet always), through those long nights in which slumber is banished,

will say to you: "What does it profit you, imperfect courtesan, not to have known what the dead weep for?" —And the worm will gnaw at your hide like remorse.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 50

2007-03-31T09:54:00.000-07:00

Insurgents lie dead with a live hand grenade besides them in Ramadi during an operation to clear insurgents on Wednesday, March 28, 2007, in Ramadi, Iraq, 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers shot the men, one of them holding a grenade, as the men tried to attack a house. They died during a US-Iraqi house-to-house sweep through what American commanders said was one of this city's last insurgent strongholds. The operation ended with rooftop gunfights, airstrikes and dead guerrillas on the streets.
(AP Photo/Todd Pitman)

from [American Journal]
by Robert Hayden

here among them the americans this baffling

multi people extremes and variegations their

noise restlessness their almost frightening

energy how best describe these aliens in my

reports to The Counselors

disguise myself in order to study them unobserved

adapting their varied pigmentations white black

red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering

distinctions by which they live by which they

justify their cruelties to one another

charming savages enlightened primitives brash

new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy how

describe them do they indeed know what or who

they are do not seem to yet no other beings

in the universe make more extravagant claims

for their importance and identity

. . .

confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to

the americans doubt i could exist among them for

long however psychic demands far too severe

much violence much that repels i am attracted

none the less their variousness their ingenuity

their elan vital and that some thing essence

quiddity i cannot penetrate or name

- - -

the complete poem

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 49

2007-03-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

The family of U.S. Army Private First Class John Landry Jr., his sister Britney (L), his mother Pamela (C) and his father John Landry Sr., stand together during burial ceremonies in Wilmington, Massachusetts, March 27, 2007. Landry Jr. was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on March 17.
REUTERS/Brian Snyder (UNITED STATES)

Aerialist
by Susan Maxwell

look the snow is like us,
tide-metal bell flung open
to ocean. No farther
says the chamber with trees
filigreed fast to its edges.
Coal-fat in winter, a prayer that burns
when inverted. Oh please
says the fire in the trees.
The story streams
from gull to gull,
each beak a clear carrier,
what happens nowhere
to be found there.
Nowhere to be found.
Overcast gull. Eyes flying
into the noise,
the lead silhouette.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 48

2007-03-26T16:58:00.000-07:00

Iraqi policemen gather bodies in the back of their pickup truck in the aftermath of a suicide truck bomb that exploded inside their compound in the predominantly Sunni al-Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad. Suicide attacks waged by a lorry driver posing as a goods merchant and a bomber in a sweet shop killed dozens of Iraqis on Saturday, underscoring the vicious nature of a changing insurgency.
(AFP/David Furst)

Monkeys

by Matthew Rohrer and Joshua Beckman

In another jungle the monkeys fret.

Vibrations are tremendous.

Terror begins.

Mist dissipates.

Monkeys alight in unison

while beneath them nothing sexy happens.

From within one mangrove a monkey flutters helplessly,

another watches.

Noise like refined alabaster drifts across our monkeys.

Human intellect dwarfs only that first tear.

Everything else excels.

Intellect is nothing to savor.

Monkeys know.

Monkeys see.

Monkeys do.

As monkeys follow nauseated foresters

across wet walkways they announce their intentions.

Mankind savors variety.

Monkeys savor mankind.

Poachers came and grabbed the monkeys.

In disturbing circumstances they thrive.

Our satellites saw lilacs.

Nighttime.

No one wanders forever.

- - -

Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq. House by house, Baghdad was being abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he’d won, to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed—he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.

From the hotel window, Othman could see the palace domes of the Green Zone directly across the Tigris River. “It’s sad,” he told me. “With all the hopes that we had, and all the dreams, I was totally against the word ‘invasion.’ Wherever I go, I was defending the Americans and strongly saying, ‘America was here to make a change.’ Now I have my doubts.”

Laith was more blunt: “Sometimes, I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”

from Betrayed - The Iraqis who trusted America the most.

by George Packer

The New Yorker

March 26, 2007

- - -

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 47

2007-03-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

A woman cries over a blood stain on the ground after her husband and two sons were killed by gunmen in Mahmoudiya, 30km (20 miles) south of Baghdad, March 24, 2007. Gunmen killed three members of a Shi'ite family in Mahmoudiya on Saturday, police said.

REUTERS/Ibrahim Sultan (IRAQ)

Outside

by Michael Ryan

The dead thing mashed into the street

the crows are squabbling over isn't

her, nor are their raucous squawks

the quiet cawing from her throat

those final hours she couldn't speak.

But the racket irks him.

It seems a cruel intrusion into grief

so mute it will never be expressed

no matter how loud or long the wailing

he might do. Nor could there be a word

that won't debase it, no matter

how kind or who it comes from.

She knew how much he loved her.

That must be his consolation

when he must talk to buy necessities.

Every place will be a place without her.

What people will see when they see him

pushing a shopping cart or fetching mail

is just a neatly dressed polite old man.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 46

2007-03-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

At al-Dora : US soldier SSG David Brown from Gator Company 2-12 Infantry Battalion grimaces as medics provide him first aid, after he was shot in the leg by unknown gunmen, while attempting to secure the area around the site of a weapons cache found while on patrol in the predominantly Sunni al-Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad.
(AFP/David Furst)

Altars of Light

by Pierre Joris

If the light is the soul

then soul is what's

all around me.

It is you,

it is around you too,

it is you.

The darkness is inside me,

the opaqueness of organs folded

upon organs--

to make light in the house of

the body--

thus to bring the

outside in,

the impossible job.

And the only place to become

the skin

the border, the inbetween, where

dark meets light, where I meets

you.

In the house of world the

many darknesses are surrounded

by light.

To see the one, we need

the other / it cuts both ways

light on light is blind

dark on dark is blind

light through dark is not

dark through light is movement

dark through light becomes,

is becoming,

to move through

light is becoming,

is all

we can know.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 45

2007-03-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

A woman cries as she waits to claim the body of a relative, killed in a mortar attack on Monday, outside Yarmouk hospital morgue in Baghdad, March 13, 2007. The attack killed two persons and wounded 15 others, police said.

REUTERS/Ali Jasim (IRAQ)

Bangladesh II

by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

translated by Agha Shahid Ali

This is how my sorrow became visible:

its dust, piling up for years in my heart,

finally reached my eyes,

the bitterness now so clear that

I had to listen when my friends

told me to wash my eyes with blood.

Everything at once was tangled in blood—

each face, each idol, red everywhere.

Blood swept over the sun, washing away its gold.

The moon erupted with blood, its silver extinguished.
The sky promised a morning of blood,

and the night wept only blood.

The trees hardened into crimson pillars.

All flowers filled their eyes with blood.

And every glance was an arrow,

each pierced image blood. This blood

—a river crying out for martyrs—

flows on in longing. And in sorrow, in rage, in love.

Let it flow. Should it be dammed up,

there will only be hatred cloaked in colors of death.

Don't let this happen, my friends,

bring all my tears back instead,

a flood to purify my dust-filled eyes,

to wash this blood forever from my eyes.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 44

2007-03-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

A Muslim Shiite Iraqi pilgrim injured in a car bomb attack in the central town of Hilla on 6 March, rests at Baghdad's Yarmuk hospital. Shiite pilgrims ran a gauntlet of sectarian attacks as the toll from a previous suicide bombing rose to 117, amid fears that a backlash could undermine the US-led Baghdad security plan.

(AFP/Wisam Sami)

Birds Appearing In A Dream

by Michael Collier

One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi,

another a tail of color-coded wires.

One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings,

another a flicker with a wounded head.

All flew like leaves fluttering to escape,

bright, circulating in burning air,

and all returned when the air cleared.

One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower,

deep in the ground, miles from water.

Everything is real and everything isn’t.

Some had names and some didn’t.

Named and nameless shapes of birds,

at night my hand can touch your feathers

and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,

you who have made bright things from shadows,

you who have crossed the distances to roost in me.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 43

2007-03-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

Residents identify a relative from among the bodies of those who were killed during Tuesday's bomb attack in Hilla, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, March 7, 2007. Insurgents killed 149 Shi'ite pilgrims heading for the holy Iraqi city of Kerbala on Tuesday, including 115 when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in one of the deadliest attacks of the 4-year-war.

REUTERS/Ali Jasim (IRAQ)

How Can It Be I Am No Longer I

by Lucie Brock-Broido

Winter was the ravaging in the scarified

Ghost garden, a freak of letters crossing down a rare

Path bleak with poplars. Only the yew were a crewel

Of kith at the fieldstone wall, annulled

As a dulcimer cinched in a green velvet sack.

To be damaged is to endanger--taut as the stark

Throats of castrati in their choir, lymphless & fawning

& pale. The miraculous conjoining

Where the beamless air harms our self & lung,

Our three-chambered heart & sternum,

Where two made a monstrous

Braid of other, ravishing.

To damage is an animal hunch

& urge, thou fallen--the marvelous much

Is the piece of Pleidaes the underworld calls

The nightsky from their mud & rime. Perennials

Ghost the ground & underground the coffled

Veins, an aneurism of the ice & spectacle.

I would not speak again. How flinching

The world will seem--in the lynch

Of light as I sail home in a winter steeled

For the deaths of the few loved left living I will

Always love. I was a flint

To bliss & barbarous, a bristling

Of tracks like a starfish carved on his inner arm,

A tindering of tissue, a reliquary, twinned.

A singe of salt-hay shrouds the orchard-skin,

That I would be--lukewarm, mammalian, even then,

In winter when moss sheathes every thing alive

& everything not or once alive.

That I would be--dryadic, gothic, fanatic against

The vanishing; I will not speak to you again.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 42

2007-03-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

A member of a U.S. Marine Honor Guard hands the United States flag to family members and Kortni VanSlyke (3rd L) at burial ceremonies for her husband Marine PFC Bufford Kenny VanSlyke at a cemetery in Bay City, Michigan, March 12, 2007. VanSlyke was killed at a checkpoint in Fallujah, Iraq.

REUTERS/Rebecca Cook (UNITED STATES)

Birds Again

by Jim Harrison

A secret came a week ago though I already

knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.

The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds

are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.

I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-

weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation

and now they’re roosting within me, recalling

how I had watched them at night

in fall and spring passing across earth moons,

little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing

on their way north or south. Now in my dreams

I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,

the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying

me rather than me carrying them. Next winter

I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado

and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching

on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye

and I’ll return my dreams to earth.

- - -

note: I recently used another photo of this family in this diary. Twenty-one is too young an age to be a widow.

Daily Witness Day 41

2007-03-14T01:40:00.000-07:00

A relative of a bombing victim lights a candle at El Pozo train station in Madrid, Spain, Sunday, March 11, 2007. Madrid is commemorating the third anniversary of Spain's worst terrorist attack which killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,700. The bombing attacks were claimed by Muslim militants who said they had acted on behalf of al-Qaida to avenge the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq.

(AP Photos/Daniel Ochoa de Olza)

Light breaks where no sun shines

by Dylan Thomas

Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs

Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;

Where no seed stirs,

The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,

Bright as a fig;

Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;

From poles of skull and toe the windy blood

Slides like a sea;

Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky

Spout to the rod

Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,

Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;

Day lights the bone;

Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin

The winter's robes;

The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,

On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;

When logics dies,

The secret of the soil grows through the eye,

And blood jumps in the sun;

Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

- - -

for Jeanne, in surgery today

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 40

2007-03-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

A man covers his head with his bloodstained hands as he grieves outside a hospital morgue while waiting to claim the body of his brother killed in Monday's mortar attack in Baghdad March 13, 2007. The attack killed two persons and wounded 15 others, police said.

REUTERS/Ali Jasim (IRAQ)

A Hand

by Jane Hirshfield

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb.

Nor is it palm and knuckles,

not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow,

not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins.

A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines

with their infinite dramas,

nor what it has written,

not on the page,

not on the ecstatic body.

Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping—

not sponge of rising yeast-bread,

not rotor pin's smoothness,

not ink.

The maple's green hands do not cup

the proliferant rain.

What empties itself falls into the place that is open.

A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question.

Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 39

2007-03-12T12:05:00.000-07:00

Iraqi refugees at work on the outskirts of Damascus in February 2007. Senior US official Ellen Sauerbrey will discuss the plight of two million Iraqi refugees when she holds talks with the Syrian government in Damascus.
(AFP/File/Louai Beshara)

I Ain't Got No Home
by Woody Guthrie

I ain't got no home, I'm just a-roamin' 'round,
Just a wandrin' worker, I go from town to town.
And the police make it hard wherever I may go
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore.

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,
A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore.

Was a-farmin' on the shares, and always I was poor;
My crops I lay into the banker's store.
My wife took down and died upon the cabin floor,
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore.

I mined in your mines and I gathered in your corn
I been working, mister, since the day I was born
Now I worry all the time like I never did before
'Cause I ain't got no home in this world anymore

Now as I look around, it's mighty plain to see
This world is such a great and a funny place to be;
Oh, the gamblin' man is rich an' the workin' man is poor,
And I ain't got no home in this world anymore.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 38

2007-03-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

A man grieves beside the coffin of his brother who was killed during Tuesday's bomb attack in Hilla, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, March 7, 2007. Insurgents killed 149 Shi'ite pilgrims heading for the holy Iraqi city of Kerbala on Tuesday, including 115 when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in one of the deadliest attacks of the 4-year-war. Arabic inscription on the coffin reads: 'Offer prayers for the soul of the deceased'.
REUTERS/Ali Jasim (IRAQ)

The Poems I Have Not Written

by John Brehm

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems

I have not written would reach

from here to the California coast

if you laid them end to end.

And if you stacked them up,

the poems I have not written

would sway like a silent

Tower of Babel, saying nothing

and everything in a thousand

different tongues. So moving, so

filled with and emptied of suffering,

so steeped in the music of a voice

speechless before the truth,

the poems I have not written

would break the hearts of every

woman who’s ever left me,

make them eye their husbands

with a sharp contempt and hate

themselves for turning their backs

on the very source of beauty.

The poems I have not written

would compel all other poets

to ask of God: "Why do you

let me live? I am worthless.

please strike me dead at once,

destroy my works and cleanse

the earth of all my ghastly

imperfections." Trees would

bow their heads before the poems

I have not written. "Take me,"

they would say, "and turn me

into your pages so that I

might live forever as the ground

from which your words arise."

The wind itself, about which

I might have written so eloquently,

praising its slick and intersecting

rivers of air, its stately calms

and furious interrogations,

its flutelike lingerings and passionate

reproofs, would divert its course

to sweep down and then pass over

the poems I have not written,

and the life I have not lived, the life

I’ve failed even to imagine,

which they so perfectly describe.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 37

2007-03-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

John W. Morse comforts his daughter Kortni VanSlyke, 21, as the remains of her husband, U.S. Marine Pfc. Bufford 'Kenny' VanSlyke, are unloaded from a cargo jet at MBS International Airport in Bay City, Mich., Tuesday, March 6, 2007. VanSlyke, 22, died Feb. 28 after being shot at a checkpoint in Anbar province, Iraq.
(AP Photo/The Bay City Times, Kevin Hagen)

Let Evening Come
by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 36

2007-03-07T07:24:00.000-08:00

Bomb attack victims lie in a hospital in a hospital in Hilla, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, March 7, 2007. Insurgents killed 149 Shi'ite pilgrims heading for the holy Iraqi city of Kerbala on Tuesday, including 115 when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in one of the deadliest attacks of the 4-year-war.

REUTERS/Ali Jasim (IRAQ)

After the Diagnosis

by Christian Wiman

No remembering now

When the apple sapling was blown

Almost to the ground.

No telling how,

With all the other trees around,

It alone was struck.

It must have been luck,

He thought for years, so close

To the house it grew.

It must have been night.

Change is a thing one sleeps through

When young, and he was young.

If there was a weakness in the earth,

A give he went down on his knees

To find and feel the limits of,

There is no longer.

If there was one random blow from above

The way he's come to know

From years in this place,

The roots were stronger.

Whatever the case,

He has watched this tree survive

Wind ripping at his roof for nights

On end, heats and blights

That left little else alive.

No remembering now...

A day's changes mean all to him

And all days come down

To one clear pane

Through which he sees

Among all other trees

This leaning, clenched, unyielding one

That seems cast

In the form of a blast

That would have killed it,

As if something at the heart of things,

And with the heart of things,

Had willed it.

from The New Yorker magazine, March 12, 2007 (p.74)

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 35

2007-03-05T17:52:00.000-08:00

A firefighter tries to extinguish a fire amid rubble just after a suicide car bomb exploded in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, March 5, 2007. A suicide car bomber struck near the well-known Mutanabi book market in central Baghdad Monday, killing at least 26 people and injuring more than 50, in a first major blast in the city in several days, police said.

(AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

Love Affair with Firearms

by Medbh McGuckian

From behind the moon boys' graves

bleed endlessly; from photograph

to browning photograph they blacken

headlines, stranded outside of time

at the story's frigid edge.

Though they are long buried

in French soil, we are still speaking

of trenches, of who rose, who fell,

who merely hung on. The morning drills

secretly, like an element that absorbs.

We are right back where we were

before the world turned over,

the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone

are all that Sunday means. Their North

was not 'The North that never was'.

Artemis, protector of virgins, shovels up

fresh pain with the newly-wed

long-stemmed roses, pressing two worlds

like a wedding kiss upon another Margaret:

lip-Irish and an old family ring.

It's like asking for grey

when that colour is not recognised,

or changes colour from friend to friend.

I track the muse through subwoods, curse

the roads, but cannot write the kiss.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 34

2007-03-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

Widows Richelle Hecker, right, and Ursula Pirtle hug at a help center for families of fallen soldiers located at Fort Hood, Texas, Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2007. Both women's husbands were killed in Iraq.
(AP Photo/LM Otero)

Letter From Kathmandu
by John Brandi

Friends, let us wake with disbelief
bare our souls, tell our stories, lose our eyes,
become vagrants of the Sea.

Let us seek the heat
of the kernel that feeds in the dark
and step aside of men whose twisted lips
pretend to lead, but are not real
in their pursuit of war.

We've already seen years
of massacre, hydrogen light the night,
children with ruined eyes, tortured by what
no one should ever see.

Let us leave our security,
open our memory, bring flowers
from the storm, write letters that become
sanctuaries, so that we ourselves
may become sanctuaries.

Friends, a dream
runs up to me smiling. I call on you
to see in the dark, to finish
the song inside you.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 33

2007-03-03T15:23:00.000-08:00

Mourners console one another outside St. Andrew's Church in Colchester, Conn., Thursday, March 1, 2007 after a funeral service for U.S. Army Sgt. Richard L. Ford. Ford, 40, died Feb. 20, 2007, of injuries sustained in combat in Iraq. Ford was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 325th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division.
(AP Photo/Bob Child)

67
by Han Shan
translated by David Hinton

The cold in these mountains is ferocious,
has been every year since the beginning.

Crowded peaks locked in perennial snows,
recluse-dark forests breathing out mists,

grasses never sprout before the solstice
and leaves start falling in early August.

This confusion includes a lost guest now,
searching, searching—no sky to be seen.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 32

2007-03-02T05:46:00.000-08:00

Charlotte Freeman, widow of Army Capt. Brian Freeman responds to questions during a news interview Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2007 in the Queens borough of New York. Captain Freeman was able to arrange for Ali's surgery, an 11-year-old Iraqi boy, through the Gift of Life International Charity. Ali is recuperating after an operation at Schneider's Children's Hospital - to repair a hole in his heart.
(AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Remembrance
by Emily Brontë

Cold in the earth--and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?

Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover
Thy noble heart forever, ever more?

Cold in the earth--and fifteen wild Decembers,
From those brown hills, have melted into spring;
Faithful, indeed, is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!

Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world's tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!

No later light has lightened up my heaven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.

But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.

Then did I check the tears of useless passion—
Weaned my young soul from yearning after thine;
Sternly denied its burning wish to hasten
Down to that tomb already more than mine.

And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?

- - -

Read more about Capt. Brian Freeman here.

An account of Ali’s hospitalization and treatment is here.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 31

2007-03-01T11:25:00.000-08:00

Iraqi children look at wrecked cars at the site of a car bomb attack in Baghdad. Bombers slaughtered 18 Iraqi children playing football on Tuesday as a relentless bombing spree snuffed out dozens more lives and a US spy chief acknowledged that the crisis amounts to "civil war".
(AFP/Ahmad al-Rubaye)

Chansons Innocentes: I
by e. e. cummings

in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far and wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles

far

and

wee

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 30

2007-02-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

A man cries as he waits to claim the body of a relative who was killed in a suicide bomb attack at the Baghdad Economy and Administration College February 25, 2007. A suicide bomber wearing a vest packed with explosives killed 40 people in the Baghdad college on Sunday, a day after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki expressed optimism about a security crackdown in the capital.
REUTERS/Kareem Raheem (IRAQ)

A Calculus of Readiness
by Liz Waldner

I, too, come from the city of dolls.
A small palm is my umbrella.
This takes care of above
but below, the blind river of sadness rolls
on and in it, a hand is always reaching up
to pick fish from the night-time sky.

The lines on the palm of the hand lure a trout
with a strand of hair from the head of a doll.
The bait is the hope for a hand on your brow.
Shadows play on the wall. Or the face of a doll.
The plants eyeing each other
is all.

I would not call the stars generous.
They don't cry enough for dolls to play Drink Me.
They don't cast a covenant's fishy rainbow
yet leaf faces watch the open window
where they hang far and hard.
The rein of starlight a second hand

with which to play Go Fish.
Now Give me a hand, plants. Now give me
good-night, stars.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 29

2007-02-27T15:49:00.000-08:00

A protester wears a banner at the start of the 'No Trident, Troops Out of Iraq' demonstration in London, February 24, 2007.
REUTERS/Luke MacGregor (BRITAIN)

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion
by William Cowper

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution,
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
Soul in a moment.

Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was,
Who for a few pence sold his holy Master.
Twice betrayed Jesus me, this last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me:
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her ever hungry mouths all
Bolted against me.

Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers;
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors;
I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram's.

Him the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent quick and howling to the center headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 28

2007-02-26T05:31:00.000-08:00

A woman injured in a suicide bomber attack gets treatment inside the Imam Ali hospital in Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, Iraq, Sunday, Feb. 25, 2007. A suicide bomber struck Sunday outside a college campus in Baghdad, killing at least 38 people and injuring dozens as a string of other blasts and rocket attacks left bloodshed around the city.
(AP Photo/Adil al-Khazali)

Woodchucks
by Maxine Kumin

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother. She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next. O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form. I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 27

2007-02-23T09:10:00.000-08:00

An Iraqi man holds the body of a boy after a car bomb explosion at a market in the neighbourhood known as New Baghdad, southeast of Baghdad, February 18, 2007. Two car bombs tore through a busy shopping area of a mainly Shi'ite district of Baghdad on Sunday, killing 55 people and wounding scores as militants defied a military offensive by U.S. and Iraqi troops.
REUTERS/Carlos Barria (IRAQ)

April 27, 1937
by Timothy Steele

General Ludendorff, two years before,
Had pushed the concept in his Total War,
And so it seemed a perfect time to see
If one could undermine an enemy
By striking its civilian population.
This proved a most effective innovation,
As the defenseless ancient Basque town learned:
Three quarters of its buildings bombed and burned,
Its children and young wives were blown to bits
Or gunned down, when they fled, by Messerschmitts.
Shocked condemnations poured forth from the press,
But Franco triumphed; and, buoyed by success,
The Luftwaffe would similarly slam
Warsaw and Coventry and Rotterdam.

Berlin cheered these developments; but two
Can play such games—and usually do—
No matter how repellent or how bloody.
And Churchill was, as always, a quick study
And would adopt the tactic as his own,
Sending the RAF to blitz Cologne.
Devising better ways to carpet-bomb
(Which later were employed in Vietnam),
The Allies, in a show of aerial might,
Incinerated Dresden in a night
That left the good and evil to their fates,
While back in the untorched United States
Others approved an even darker plan
To coax a prompt surrender from Japan.

That day in Spain has taught us, to our cost,
That there are lines that never should be crossed;
The ignorance of leaders is not bliss
If they’re intent on tempting Nemesis.
Each day we rise, and each day life goes on:
An author signs beneath a colophon;
Trucks carry freight through waves of desert heat;
A bat cracks, a crowd rises to its feet;
Huge jets lift to the sky, and, higher yet,
Float satellites that serve the Internet.
But still, despite our cleverness and love,
Regardless of the past, regardless of
The future on which all our hopes are pinned,
We’ll reap the whirlwind, who have sown the wind.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 26

2007-02-22T06:24:00.000-08:00

A Marine Honor Guard carries the casket of Marine Sgt. Maj. Joseph J. Ellis, of Ashland, Ohio, during funeral services at Arlington Cemetery in Arlington, Va., Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2007. He was killed February 7th in Iraq's Anbar Province west of Baghdad.
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Marilyn Adams talks about the loss of her husband, Pennsylvania National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Brent Adams, while in the family room in Wexford, Pa., Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007. 'I'm torn,' she said about the war in Iraq. 'Should we finish the job? And then I go to the funerals of the local guys and I'm like, this is just stupid ... I don't think we're going to finish it there. I don't think there's a finishing point. They're getting more efficient at killing us, that's a direct quote from the president.'
(AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

V. What The Thunder Said
from The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 25

2007-02-20T08:49:00.000-08:00

A woman who claims that she was raped by three members if the Iraqi police force cries as she talks to members of the press in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Feb. 19, 2007. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered an investigation Monday into allegations by a Sunni Arab woman that she was raped by three members of the Shiite-dominated police force after she was detained over the weekend.
(AP Photo/Asaad Mouhsin)

from America
by Herman Melville

III

Yet later, and the silk did wind
Her fair cold form;
Little availed the shining shroud,
Though ruddy in hue, to cheer or warm
A watcher looked upon her low, and said-
She sleeps, but sleeps, she is not dead.
But in that sleep contortion showed
The terror of the vision there-
A silent vision unavowed,
Revealing earth's foundation bare,
And Gorgon in her hidden place.
It was a thing of fear to see
So foul a dream upon so fair a face,
And the dreamer lying in that starry shroud.

"Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile."
from Riverbend’s blog, Bagdhad Burning
posted Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 24

2007-02-19T09:52:00.000-08:00

An Iraqi youth cries as he leaves the scene of a car bomb explosion at a market in the neighbourhood known as New Baghdad, southeast of Baghdad, February 18, 2007. Two car bombs tore through a busy shopping area of a mainly Shi'ite district of Baghdad on Sunday, killing 55 people and wounding scores as militants defied a military offensive by U.S. and Iraqi troops.
REUTERS/Carlos Barria (IRAQ)

The Slave Mother
by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Heard you that shriek? It rose
So wildly on the air,
It seemed as if a burden'd heart
Was breaking in despair.

Saw you those hands so sadly clasped--
The bowed and feeble head--
The shuddering of that fragile form--
That look of grief and dread?

Saw you the sad, imploring eye?
Its every glance was pain,
As if a storm of agony
Were sweeping through the brain.

She is a mother pale with fear,
Her boy clings to her side,
And in her kirtle vainly tries
His trembling form to hide.

He is not hers, although she bore
For him a mother's pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
Is coursing through his veins!

He is not hers, for cruel hands
May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
That binds her breaking heart.

His love has been a joyous light
That o'er her pathway smiled,
A fountain gushing ever new,
Amid life's desert wild.

His lightest word has been a tone
Of music round her heart,
Their lives a streamlet blent in one--
Oh, Father! must they part?

They tear him from her circling arms,
Her last and fond embrace.
Oh! never more may her sad eyes
Gaze on his mournful face.

No marvel, then, these bitter shrieks
Disturb the listening air:
She is a mother, and her heart
Is breaking in despair.

War Grief Daily Witness Day 23

2007-02-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

a personal note: I've been away and have not posted for almost a week. Today's embedded video interview with Ishmael Beah is provided in the spirit of hope.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 22

2007-02-13T13:22:00.000-08:00

A Kurdish boy walks down the stands of a stadium turned into a displacement camp in Kirkuk, 290 kilometers (180 miles) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, Feb. 11, 2007. Even as the world focuses on Baghdad's security, a series of bombings here may be the long-feared start of a second deadly war in Iraq, this one between Kurds and Arabs, both with claims on a territory atop one of the world's largest oil reserves.
(AP Photo/Yahya Ahmed)

from Last Things
by William Meredith
for Robert Lowell

IV
At the edge of the Greek world, I think, was a cliff
To which fallen gods were chained, immortal.
Time is without forgiveness, but intermittently
He sends the old, sentimental, hungry
Vulture compassion to gnaw on the stone
Vitals of each of us, even the young, as if
To ready each of us, even the old, for an unthinkable
Event he foresees for each of us—a reckoning, our own.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 21

2007-02-12T11:55:00.000-08:00

Firemen hose down a burning building after twin car bomb attacks at Shorja market in Baghdad February 12, 2007.
(Thaier al-Sudani/Reuters)

MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE DESIGN OF CITIES WILL BE THE DESIGN OF THEIR DECAY

by Tessa Rumsey

Where did you grow, before your roots took hold in the garden?
Curiouser and curiouser, this allegiance you seem to have with rocks.
Bluish blooms bathed in perfection, the moon shines fresh as you melt away.

Loneliness is a laboratory; its territory is forever defined; for reasons beyond our conviction It cannot be lessened; only redirected and made to resemble a crumbling heaven or the year’s Grand delusion: I shall no longer want for that which left me long ago—go slow, said the soul, That you may know the streets of your abandoned city more intimately than any joy Or cherished season. We were in collusion, this city and I, creating a mythology of desolation; Feeling utterly evacuated; yet methodically structured; in a post-Roman Empire; previously Doomed sort of way—and what did the soul say, but know it better, then in a fever, go deeper. There are days, I told the translator, when the veil drops and I am no longer inside the No-Place most familiar, built by me long ago, and I walk through the world as if made real By the existence of others and the casual way a crowd pauses together on a concrete curbside— Perhaps one of them is weeping, perhaps another will gently reach out and twist a knife Into my heart and we will lock eyes, and I will fall to my knees, and for a moment He will hold me. What will I remember? The cold blade’s cruel demeanor? My body As it seizures? Or the gesture of my destroyer, showing me that in this life, I was not alone.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 20

2007-02-11T11:15:00.000-08:00

Soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division rest wile waiting to depart for Iraq at a deployment center in Craig Gym at Fort Riley, Kan., Thursday, Feb. 8, 2007. They are part of the 21,500 solder increase sought by President Bush to turn the tide in Iraq.
(AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 19

2007-02-10T11:08:00.000-08:00

Joy Oakes, 26, sister of Staff Sgt. Raymond Girouard, speaks during an interview at her grandfather's home Friday, Feb., 2007 in Sweetwater, Tenn. The 24-year-old staff sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division, was one of four soldiers charged with murdering three Iraqi detainees last year. The other soldiers have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors; Girouard, the squad leader, is in a military jail in Charleston, S.C., awaiting a court-martial next month at Fort Campbell. Oakes has set up an office, collected and sent to her brother newspaper clippings and letters from Sweetwater residents, and printed up 500 bumper stickers that read, 'We support our soldier Staff Sgt. Ray Girouard.'
(AP Photo/Wade Payne)

from The Cleaving
by Li-Young Lee

He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
amused all afternoon
in the Hon Kee Grocery,
amid hanging meats he
chops: roast pork cut
from a hog hung
by nose and shoulders,
her entire skin burnt
crisp, flesh I know
to be sweet,
her shining
face grinning
up at ducks
dangling single file,
each pierced by black
hooks through breast, bill,
and steaming from a hole
stitched shut at the ass,
I step to the counter, recite,
and he, without even slightly
varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue,
scribbles my order on a greasy receipt,
and chops it up quick.

Such a sorrowful Chinese face,
nomad, Gobi, Northern
in its boniness
clear from the high
warlike forehead
to the sheer edge of the jaw.
He could be my brother, but finer,
and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged,
sinewy from his daily grip and
wield of a two-pound tool,
he's delicate, narrow-
waisted, his frame
so slight a lover, some
rough other
might break it down
its smooth, oily length.
In his light-handed calligraphy
on receipts and in his
moodiness, he is
a Southerner from a river-province;
suited for scholarship, his face poised
above an open book, he'd mumble
his favorite passages.
He could be my grandfather;
come to America to get a Western education
in 1917, but too homesick to study,
he sits in the park all day, reading poems
and writing letters to his mother.

He lops the head off, chops
the neck of the duck
into six, slits
the body
open, groin
to breast, and drains
the scalding juices,
then quarters the carcass
with two fast hacks of the cleaver,
old blade that has worn
into the surface of the round
foot-thick chop-block
a scoop that cradles precisely the curved steel.

The head, flung from the body, opens
down the middle where the butcher
cleanly halved it between
the eyes, and I
see, foetal-crouched
inside the skull, the homunculus,
gray brain grainy
to eat.
Did this animal, after all, at the moment
its neck broke,
image the way his executioner
shrinks from his own death?
Is this how
I, too, recoil from my day?
See how this shape
hordes itself, see how
little it is.
See its grease on the blade.
Is this how I'll be found
when judgement is passed, when names
are called, when crimes are tallied?
This is also how I looked before I tore my mother open.
Is this how I presided over my century, is this how
I regarded the murders?
This is also how I prayed.
Was it me in the Other
I prayed to when I prayed?
This too was how I slept, clutching my wife.
Was it me in the other I loved
when I loved another?
The butcher sees me eye this delicacy.
With a finger, he picks it
out of the skull-cradle
and offers it to me.
I take it gingerly between my fingers
and suck it down.
I eat my man.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 18

2007-02-08T09:49:00.000-08:00

Carolyn Ho, mother of Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada sheds a tear while she is hugged by Carlos Arredondo, who's son Alex was killed in Iraq while serving in the Marine Corps, during a new conference in DuPont, Wash., after the court-martial was ruled a mistrial at Fort Lewis, Wash., Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2007. Watada announced last June that he would refuse to go to Iraq with his unit, the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.
(AP Photo/John Froschauer)

All Things Must Pass
by George Harrison

Sunrise doesn’t last all morning
A cloudburst doesn’t last all day
Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning
It’s not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away

Sunset doesn’t last all evening
A wind can blow those clouds away
After all this, my love is up and must be leaving
It’s not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass

None of life’s strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day

Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
It’s not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
All things must pass away

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 17

2007-02-06T20:03:00.000-08:00

An Iraqi wounded in a bomb blast sits inside the Imam Ali hospital in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City in Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, Feb. 3, 2007. A suicide truck bomber struck the busy outdoor Sadriyah market in a predominantly Shiite area of Baghdad on Saturday, killing at least 82 people and wounding dozens, police and hospital officials said.
(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

from Paradise Lost, IV
by John Milton

The Argument

O for that warning voice, which he who saw
The Apocalypse heard cry in Heaven aloud,
Then when the Dragon, put to second rout,
Came furious down to be revenged on men,
Woe to the inhabitants on Earth! that now,
While time was, our first parents had been warned
The coming of their secret Foe, and scaped,
Haply so scaped, his mortal snare! For now
Satan, now first inflamed with rage, came down,
The tempter, ere the accuser, of mankind,
To wreak on innocent frail Man his loss
Of that first battle, and his flight to Hell.
Yet not rejoicing in his speed, though bold
Far off and fearless, nor with cause to boast,
Begins his dire attempt; which, nigh the birth
Now rowling, boils in his tumultuous breast,
And like a devilish engine back recoils
Upon himself. Horror and doubt distract
His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir
The hell within him; for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step, no more than from Himself, can fly
By change of place. Now conscience wakes despair
That slumbered; wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue!

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 16

2007-02-04T14:14:00.000-08:00

An Iraqi woman watches as soldiers from Delta Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment searches her home near Youssifiyah, 12 miles (20 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq Saturday, Feb. 3, 2007.
(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

Curse One: The Wraith
by Cynthia Huntington

You are a small shape of death crouched among leaves.
The twist of your red mouth is the torque of poison.
Tangle of leaves, spill of leaves, slow rot of leaves. . .
Misery, ruin, iniquity. You are the scuffling thing in dry grass.
Rodent, snail, the curly-legged spider, centipede, rat snake.
I see you by the back-hooded barbecue in November, brooding
like the smoke of burned meat. The fire in the coals gone out,
the sun hung low and weak in smoldering sky, cold
breath of winter. You are all smoke breath, grief, and conniving.
You are the alien thing invading my garden, a haunt, a plague,
lurking beyond light and warmth, there in the shadows wearing
death inside out, a curse on the sky. You are a spot, a flaw, a
blotch and a stain on the world you corrupt and I hate
you and fear you and look for you everywhere with dread.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 15

2007-02-02T13:19:00.000-08:00

A man who was wounded during Thursday night's suicide bomb attack, lies in a hospital in Hilla, about 100 km (60 miles) south of Baghdad, February 2, 2007. Two suicide bombers killed 45 people and wounded 150 when they blew themselves up at a crowded market in the Iraqi town of Hilla on Thursday, police said.
REUTERS/Mushtaq Muhammad (IRAQ)

Bone Song
by Tom Lavazzi

It doesn’t turn anymore
the worn stone
the seasons halted at winter

I remember
when two bones, rubbed together
made people laugh
and weep at times

now, many rest
like broken marionettes
in shallow pits
It will always be cold

The new bread
common and tasteless
is no longer made here
warm like a cat

And vacant carriages
with wheels deaf as faces
never leave the pale houses

Yet I stay a moment longer
at the table
looking at the waxed and wired skull
wondering how to answer it

The eyes, no eyes
already have begun
to reclaim

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 14

2007-02-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

Relatives grieve lost loved ones at al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday Jan. 22, 2007. Two nearly simultaneous bombs struck a predominantly Shiite commercial area in central Baghdad, killing at least 78 people and wounding at least 156, said Deputy Health Minister Hakim al-Zamili.
(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

Conscious
by Wilfred Owen

His fingers wake, and flutter; up the bed.
His eyes come open with a pull of will,
Helped by the yellow mayflowers by his head.
The blind-cord drawls across the window-sill...
What a smooth floor the ward has! What a rug!
Who is that talking somewhere out of sight?
Three flies creeping round the shiny jug...
'Nurse! Doctor!'-'Yes; all right, all right.'

But sudden evening muddles all the air.
There seems no time to want a drink of water.
Nurse looks so far away. And here and there
Music and roses burst through crimson slaughter.
He can't remember where he saw blue sky...
The trench is narrower. Cold, he's cold; yet hot-
And there's no light to see the voices by...
There is no time to ask...he knows not what.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 13

2007-01-31T14:48:00.000-08:00

Dody Callahan, the widow of Army Sgt. 1st Class Keith A. Callahan, reacts as she emerges from St. Charles Church in Woburn, Mass., Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2007, after the soldier's funeral. Callahan died Wednesday, Jan. 24 of wounds suffered when an improvised explosive device detonated while he was conducting a combat patrol south of Baghdad, according to the Department of Defense.
(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

"Now, I know you remember so and so"
by Doris Davenport

meaning somebody who rode through town once, ten
years ago or who lived and died before your birth. They
expect you to remember, to know, just like your mind is
their mind and if you don't, they might take it personal.
Get so made at you, they can't get on with the story.

Not like Fannie Mae. She will get all into a story and
catch herself: "But that was before you
were born." Fannie Mae will pause, grin for emphasis
and say, "And I wish you
coulda seen it!"

not me.
when i get through
when i'm done
won't be no wishing
you could see.
you gone see.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 12

2007-01-30T20:24:00.000-08:00

Iraqis receive the corpses of their killed relatives from the morgue of a hospital in Baghdad's impoverished district of Sadr City. Iraqi and US forces have captured more than 600 fighters loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, the US military said, while violence across the country claimed another 36 lives.
(AFP/Ahmad al-Rubaye)

Easter Sunday, 1985
by Charles Martin

"To take steps toward the reappearance alive of the disappeared is a subversive act, and measures will be adopted to deal with it."
General Oscar Mejia Victores,
President of Guatemala

In the Palace of the President this morning,
The General is gripped by the suspicion
That those who were disappeared will be returning
In a subversive act of resurrection.

Why do you worry? The disappeared can never
Be brought back from wherever they were taken;
The age of miracles is gone forever;
These are not sleeping, nor will they awaken.

And if some tell you Christ once reappeared
Alive, one Easter morning, that he was seen—
Give them the lie, for who today can find him?

He is perhaps with those who were disappeared,
Broken and killed, flung into some ravine
With his arms safely wired up behind him.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 11

2007-01-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

Residents grieve over the bodies of relatives killed in simultaneous bomb attacks in Baghdad, January 22, 2007.
(Kareem Raheem/Reuters)

You Tell Us What to Do
by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
translated by Agha Shahid Ali

When we launched life
on the river of grief,
how vital were our arms, how ruby our blood.
With a few strokes, it seemed,
we would cross all pain,
we would soon disembark.
That didn't happen.
In the stillness of each wave we found invisible currents.
The boatmen, too, were unskilled,
their oars untested.
Investigate the matter as you will,
blame whomever, as much as you want,
but the river hasn't changed,
the raft is still the same.
Now you suggest what's to be done,
you tell us how to come ashore.

When we saw the wounds of our country
appear on our skins,
we believed each word of the healers.
Besides, we remembered so many cures,
it seemed at any moment
all troubles would end, each wound heal completely.
That didn't happen: our ailments
were so many, so deep within us
that all diagnoses proved false, each remedy useless.
Now do whatever, follow each clue,
accuse whomever, as much as you will,
our bodies are still the same,
our wounds still open.
Now tell us what we should do,
you tell us how to heal these wounds.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 10

2007-01-28T18:46:00.000-08:00

dedicated today in honor and thanksgiving for all who marched

An anti-Iraq war protester gestures for peace while U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (L) testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 11, 2007.
REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES)

Liam Madden poses for a portrait, Friday, Jan. 26, 2007 in the Brooklyn borough of New York. Madden, a Marine sergeant who received his discharge Jan. 20, served in Iraq and with Navy Petty Officer Jonathan Hutto founded Appeal for Redress, an organization of 1,200 active-duty personnel and veterans who favor a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. A small number of active military troops will take part in Saturday's rally in Washington against the Iraq war, the co-founders of the active-duty protest group say.
(AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Snow is seen on the demonstration site of anti-war protestor Brian Haw in Parliament Square, London, as the Palace of Westminster is seen in the background, after an overnight snow fall, Wednesday Jan. 24, 2007. Haw has held a continuous vigil at the site since June 2, 2001
(AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Ring out, wild bells
from In Memoriam
by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 9

2007-01-27T10:18:00.000-08:00

A U.S. soldier touches the head of the room mate of the late PFC Allen Brenton Jaynes from Texas during a memorial service in the U.S. forces army camp in Baghdad, January 26, 2007. Jaynes was killed last week by a roadside bomb while four of his colleagues were wounded.
REUTERS/Erik de Castro (IRAQ)

I Hear an Army
by James Joyce

I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 8

2007-01-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

A man runs from the scene of a car bomb attack in Baghdad, January 25, 2007.
(Namir Noor-Eldeen/Reuters)

A Crosstown Breeze
by Henry Taylor

A drift of wind
when August wheeled
brought back to mind
an alfalfa field

where green windrows
bleached down to hay
while storm clouds rose
and rolled our way.

With lighthearted strain
in our pastoral agon
we raced the rain
with baler and wagon,

driving each other
to hold the turn
out of the weather
and into the barn.

A nostalgic pause
claims we saved it all,
but I’ve known the loss
of the lifelong haul;

now gray concrete
and electric light
wear on my feet
and dull my sight.

So I keep asking,
as I stand here,
my cheek still basking
in that trick of air,

would I live that life
if I had the chance,
or is it enough
to have been there once?

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 7

2007-01-24T17:27:00.000-08:00

Smoke rises as a US Apache helicopter hovers over Baghdad's restive Haifa street district. A steady barrage of machine-gun fire and mortars was thundering across Baghdad as Iraqi and US forces battled insurgents in one of the capital's Sunni bastions.
(AFP/Sabah Arar)

Crowds Surround Us

by Tom Thompson

agile founderings and piecemeal flotations.

The crowd constitutes a gravitational field

that slaps back at the ground, numbed

and maddened by ground’s constant suckling.

The crowd embodies a depression in fabric

more than an attraction. Its angled, arteried, fleet

fantasias of need sway in

a loopy, bobbing dance without strings.

It’s this sense of movement the organism uses

to believe in its own existence, the palpable presence

of an intangible parade, uncertain

planetary marches, a supernumerary of stars.

In its mania for artifice the crowd has sewn the sky

with these shiny extras. Embodied

adoration, they snap the organism shut

before tickling it open again

with reedy gestures. Breathe.

The crowd’s louche body

clings and parts in place, an ovation

rigid and adrift, alive. It is the sea

that sweeps the sea.

Broom tight with inner bickering.

A mortal scour. Meaning,

how the crowd hates the crowd.

Outwardly. It admits you or me

as an enormous lidless eye admits glittering

beams. Endless watching, washing us in.

The crowd’s object, its point,

is always vanishing into its own mass. It is a sea

with no concern for us, even as it scores.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 6

2007-01-23T10:33:00.000-08:00

A person burns in a minibus shortly after a bomb attack in Baghdad, January 21, 2007. A bomb killed two people and wounded seven when it destroyed a minibus in Karrada, in central Baghdad, police said.
REUTERS/Namir Noor-Eldeen (IRAQ)

Burning the Fields
by Linda Bierds

In the windless late sunlight of August,

my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back,

the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy

rippled. I watched from a shallow hill

as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck,

galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced

at the fire trench, circled back,

arced again, the flames behind

sketching first a C, then closing to O—a word

or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart,

gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare

beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence,

some cinch-corral she might have known,

the way the walls moved rhythmically,

in and in. And to the crows, manic

on the thermals? A crescent of their planet,

gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter

past the fence line, then settle

on a Hereford's tufted nape,

as if to peck some safer grain, as if

the red-cast back it rode

contained no transformations.

A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there

and there, the russet flood of rabbits.

Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls

began, shrill and wavering, as if

their dormant voice strings

had tightened into threads of glass.

In an instant they were gone—the rabbits,

their voices—over the fire trench,

into the fallows. My father walked

near the burn line, waved up to me, and from

that wave, or the rippled film of heat,

I remembered our porch in an August wind,

how he stepped through the weathered doorway,

his hand outstretched with some

book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered

to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but

as he spoke it atomized before us—

pulp and stem, the pollened tongue,

dreadful in the dancing air.

Scummed and boxcar thin,

six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields.

Inside them, lilies, lilies—

a thousand shades of white, I think.

Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax.

Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed

ancestral to me, the fluted heads of

dowagers, their meaty, groping,

silent tongues. They seemed

to form perspective's chain:

cinder, bone, divinity . . .

My father waved. The crows set down.

By evening, our fields took the texture

of freshened clay, a sleek

and water-bloated sheen, although no water

rested there—just heat and ash

united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line,

circled closer, the grasses all around me

collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent

I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems—

brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown

to echo grass. The soot was warm,

the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing,

and as a breeze crossed slowly through,

stems glowed—then ebbed—

consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path,

and then a kind of journey.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 5

2007-01-22T08:43:00.000-08:00

The body of a bomb attack victim is brought to a hospital morgue in Baghdad January 16, 2007. A car bomb and a suicide bomber killed 60 people and wounded 110 more, including many students blown up as they waited for cars to take them home at the entrance to a university in Baghdad, police said.
REUTERS/Kareem Raheem (IRAQ)

by Maurya Simon

Noon. I can connect nothing with nothing.

Perhaps even chaos is cause for celebration.

And perhaps the astrologers are right when they chart

one disaster, one propitious night, one happenstance

of glory to the next so they accrue like an alphabet

in the primer of each person's life. I read my horoscope

each day, searching for the solitary clue, the sign

signaling my journey's halt, when I might look up

at last into the stars, connect-the-dots--see, at once,

the bright Virgin standing steadfastly like a silver ship

docked among the midnight swarms, her left hand

beckoning

to me, as if nothing floats between us but the world.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 4

2007-01-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

A man covers a child killed at Bab al-Sheik market in central Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007. Two bombs were detonated five minutes apart Tuesday in a used motorcycle marketplace in central Baghdad, killing at least 15 people and wounding 74 others, police said. The first bomb was attached to a motorcycle in the market. As the curious gathered to look at the aftermath, a suicide car bomber drove into the crowd and blew up his vehicle.

(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

from Apricots Died Young

by Chiao Meng

translated by David Hinton

Apricots died young in blossoms still nipples. Frost cut them free, and their scattering made me

mourn the child I had long ago,

so I wrote this poem.

Don't fondle these pearls. O hands of ice,

fondle pearls and they're quick to fly.

And don't cut spring short, sudden frost.

Cut spring short and that blaze of beauty's lost.

Still nipples, tiny blossoms fall in tatters

tinged pure as a child's robes long ago.

I gather them, never filling my hands,

and at dusk, grief empty, return home.

It must be this same thread of tears

piercing the hearts of spring trees:

before blossoms opened anywhere,

flake after flake fell to the blade.

Spring's life never lasts, it's true,

but my lament over frost is already

impossibly deep. Instead of blossoms

bathing streams, tears bathe robes.

At our son's birth, the moon was dark,

and when he died, it began to shine.

Moon and child, they stole each other

away. O scarcely lived child of mine,

what's it like, blossom after blossom,

if not endless blue heavens in lament,

sweetness falling into earthen dust,

nothing left to bloom in other times?

Calamity infecting a child is natural:

blossoms mostly fail. Still, I gather

ruins of the heart, a spent old man

cradling love's debris in endless night.

What can be said once sound dies away?

And once hope's dead, song's useless.

Old and sick--no child, no grandchild,

I stand like bundled firewood, alone.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 3

2007-01-20T05:11:00.000-08:00

The bodies of bomb attack victims lie on a police vehicle in a market in Baghdad January 18, 2007. At least 17 people were killed and 47 wounded in car bombings in Baghdad on Thursday as insurgents staged a fresh series of attacks in a bloody week in the Iraqi capital.
REUTERS/Namir Noor-Eldeen (IRAQ)

Vespers

by Louise Glück

In your extended absence, you permit me

use of earth, anticipating

some return on investment. I must report

failure in my assignment, principally

regarding the tomato plants.

I think I should not be encouraged to grow

tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold

the heavy rains, the cold nights that come

so often here, while other regions get

twelve weeks of summer. All this

belongs to you: on the other hand,

I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots

like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart

broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly

multiplying in the rows. I doubt

you have a heart, in our understanding of

that term. You who do not discriminate

between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,

immune to foreshadowing, you may not know

how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,

the red leaves of the maple falling

even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible

for these vines.

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 2

2007-01-19T05:53:00.000-08:00

A woman injured at Bab al-Sheik market in central Baghdad, Iraq, lies at al-Kindi hospital Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2007. Two bombs were detonated five minutes apart Tuesday in a used motorcycle marketplace in central Baghdad, killing at least 15 people and wounding 74 others, police said. The first bomb was attached to a motorcycle in the market. As the curious gathered to look at the aftermath, a suicide car bomber drove into the crowd and blew up his vehicle.
(AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

An Unemployed Machinist
by John Giorno

An unemployed
machinist
An unemployed machinist
who traveled
here
who traveled here
from Georgia
from Georgia 10 days ago
10 days ago
and could not find
a job
and could not find a job
walked
into a police station
walking into a police station
yesterday and said
yesterday
and said:

"I'm tired
of being scared
I'm tired of being scared."

Iraq War Grief Daily Witness Day 1

2007-01-18T12:49:00.000-08:00

Cayetana G. Palacios cries as her son, U.S. Army Corporal Eric G. Palacios-Rivera, of Atlantic City, N.J., is posthumously recognized with the Drum Major for Community Service award, during the New Jersey Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Commission's annual King Holiday Celebration, Sunday, Jan. 14, 2007, at the War Memorial in Trenton, N.J. Palacios-Rivera was killed in action in Iraq on Nov. 14, 2006. He is pictured on his mother's shirt.
(AP Photo/David Gard)

from Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus

by Denise Levertov

ii Gloria

Praise the wet snow

falling early.

Praise the shadow

my neighbor's chimney casts on the tile roof

even this gray October day that should, they say,

have been golden.

Praise

the invisible sun burning beyond

the white cold sky, giving us

light and the chimney's shadow.

Praise

god or the gods, the unknown,

that which imagined us, which stays

our hand,

our murderous hand,

and gives us

still,

in the shadow of death,

our daily life,

and the dream still

of goodwill, of peace on earth.

Praise

flow and change, night and

the pulse of day.