Iraq War Grief Daily Witness (photo) Day 130

this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters

cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.

3 images and poem below the fold

Martha Perez wipes away tears while holding a picture of her son Luis Alberto Figueroa, a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, as thousands participate in an anti-war march in downtown Los Angeles September 24, 2005. Thousands of protesters flooded Los Angeles on Saturday to stage demonstrations against the U.S.-led war in Iraq and to demand that President George W. Bush bring troops home.
REUTERS/Phil McCarten

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, Monday, Sept. 26, 2005, pauses at the gate of the White House holding a photo of her son Casey who was killed in Iraq last year. She tried to see President Bush and was turned away . Sheehan along with other anti-war demonstrators protested outside the White House and were later arrested.
(AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

Maddison Campbell,19, wife of Sgt. Jeremy M. Campbell, of Middlebury, Pa., watches as members of the U.S. Army 3rd US Infantry (The Old Guard), carry the flagged draped casket during funeral services at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005. Campbell died on Sept. 11, 2005, in Baghdad, Iraq, where an improvised explosive device detonated near his Humvee during patrol operations.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

from The Lotos-Eaters
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Dear is the memory of our wedded lives,
And dear the last embraces of our wives
And their warm tears: but all hath suffer’d change:
For surely now our household hearths are cold,
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings
Before them of the ten years’ war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things.
Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.
The Gods are hard to reconcile:
‘Tis hard to settle order once again.
There is confusion worse than death,
Trouble on trouble, pain on pain,
Long labour unto aged breath,
Sore task to hearts worn out by many wars
And eyes grown dim with gazing on the pilot-stars.