Iraq War Grief Daily Witness (photo) Day 287

“[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 – today in memory of a young colleague, Michael Tsan Ty

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

april is national poetry month

image and poem below the fold

Iraqis look at a body found near the bus station Wednesday April 5, 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad. Unidentified gunmen killed a police recruit nearby the bus terminal in Ramadi, and left his body with his recruitment card pinned to his chest with a rock.
(AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)

War Photograph
by Kate Daniels

A naked child is running
along the path toward us,
her arms stretched out,
her mouth open,
the world turned to trash
behind her.

She is running from the smoke
and the soldiers, from the bodies
of her mother and little sister
thrown down into a ditch,
from the blown-up bamboo hut
from the melted pots and pans.
And she is also running from the gods
who have changed the sky to fire
and puddled the earth with skin and blood.
She is running–my god–to us,
10,000 miles away,
reading the caption
beneath her picture
in a weekly magazine.
All over the country
we’re feeling sorry for her
and being appalled at the war
being fought in the other world.
She keeps on running, you know,
after the shutter of the camera
clicks. She’s running to us.
For how can she know,
her feet beating a path
on another continent?
How can she know
what we really are?
From the distance, we look
so terribly human.