image: Cindy Sheehan points to a picture of her son, Army Specialist Casey Sheehan, while visiting members of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., June 15, 2005. Sheehan’s son, Army Specialist Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004. REUTERS/Mannie Garcia
Cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, and European Tribune.
image and poem below the fold
Saddest Poem
by Pablo Neruda
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
– – –
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
support the fallen
support the troops
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read `This is what John Kerry did today,’ the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s blog – `Bagdhad Burning’
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
witness every day
It will be mothers, like Cindy Sheehan, that will finally bring an end to this war. It will be mothers, like me, who refuse to give up sons, warm from their beds, fresh from the senior prom, to the hellish altar that is Iraq.
But, where are those mothers now? They are shopping. They are at the gym. They are behind a desk, in front of a class of kids, making breakfast, weeding the garden, taking care of the sick.
We haven’t mobilized yet, and I’m afraid it will take serious talk of a draft before we do.
This reminds me so vividly of the end of “Fahrenheit 9/11” when Moore introduces us to the mother who lost her son in Iraq. The entire movie theater was bawling like babies through her segment. There is nothing more heartwrenching than that kind of utterly inconsolable grief.
Cindy is a true blue hero!
Thank you so much Rub for showing her picture today!
I’ll be watching her tonight at 5Pacific at the “basement meeting” when it re-airs.
Here’s to “HOPE!” and all the hard work ahead to stop this lie and bloodshed.