Iraq War Grief Daily Witness (photo) Day 285

“[I]n times of crisis it’s interesting that people don’t turn to the novel or say, ‘We should all go out to a movie,’ or ‘Ballet would help us.’ It’s always poetry. What we want to hear is a human voice speaking directly in our ear.”

Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003) speaking to the New York Times, as quoted in The Dead Beat by Marilyn Johnson

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

we honor courage in all its forms

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

april is national poetry month

images and poem below the fold

A man weeps as he looks at the coffins for four relatives who were shot to death in their family home Sunday night by four gunmen Monday April 3, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq. Family mourned for victims of gunmen who charged into a Shiite home late Sunday, lined up a brother, two sisters, and an uncle against a wall and shot them dead, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged Iraqi leaders to form a government as soon as possible to curb the bloodshed and rein in sectarian militias behind much of the country’s violence.(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Iraqis put a body of a relative in a coffin outside the morgue of a local hospital in Baghdad. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British counterpart Jack Straw wound up two days of intensive talks with Iraqi leaders pressing them to speed up the formation of a new government but without any indication of a breakthrough.(AFP/Ahmad Al Rubaye)

A woman weeps for her relative who was shot to death along with four others in their family home Sunday night by gunmen, Monday April 3, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq. Family mourned for victims of gunmen who charged into a Shiite home late Sunday, lined up a brother, two sisters, and an uncle against a wall and shot them dead, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged Iraqi leaders to form a government as soon as possible to curb the bloodshed and rein in sectarian militias behind much of the country’s violence.(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

A man collapses as he views the bodies of four relatives who were shot to death in their family home Sunday night by a gunman, Monday April 3, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq. Family mourned for victims of gunmen who charged into a Shiite home late Sunday, lined up a brother, two sisters, and an uncle against a wall and shot them dead, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged Iraqi leaders to form a government as soon as possible to curb the bloodshed and rein in sectarian militias behind much of the country’s violence.(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Iraqi women weep as they look at the coffin carrying their relative who was part of a family which was shot to death by gunmen Sunday night at a morgue in Baghdad, Iraq Monday April 3, 2006. Family mourned for victims of gunmen who charged into a Shiite home late Sunday, lined up a brother, two sisters, and an uncle against a wall and shot them dead, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged Iraqi leaders to form a government as soon as possible to curb the bloodshed and rein in sectarian militias behind much of the country’s violence.(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Women weep for relatives who were shot to death in their family home Sunday night by four gunmen Monday April 3, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq. Family mourned for victims of gunmen who charged into a Shiite home late Sunday, lined up a brother, two sisters, and an uncle against a wall and shot them dead, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged Iraqi leaders to form a government as soon as possible to curb the bloodshed and rein in sectarian militias behind much of the country’s violence.(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, left, and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw speak at a joint press briefing Monday April 3, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq. Straw and Rice both acknowledged that the Iraqis had made progress in building a democratic system after decades of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, economic sanctions and conflict but said that it was now crucial that they move forward quickly to ensure the nominations of the senior positions.(AP Photo/Mohammed Hato)

Epilogue
by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme–
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.