“[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
image and poem below the fold
An Iraqi woman and her children look from the door of her house at their neighbors packing their belongings after unknown militants detonated a bomb near their small house and partially destroyed it, in the town of Buhrouz, northeast of Baghdad. Nine Iraqis were killed and seven people kidnapped in a wave of violence as Shiite politicians returned to crucial talks on assembling a national unity government.
(AFP/Ali Yussef)
Three American Women and a German Bayonet
by Winfield Townley Scott
Outweighing all, heavy out of the souvenir bundle
The German bayonet: grooved steel socketed in its worn
wood handle,
Its detached and threatening silence.
Its gun-body lost, the great knife wrested to a personal
particular violence–
Now bared shamelessly for what it is, here exposed on the
American kitchen table and circled with the wreath
Of his three women, the hard tool of death.
And while Mary his mother says ‘I do not like it. Put it down’
Mary the young sister, her eyes gleaming and round,
Giddily giggles as, the awkward toy in her left hand,
She makes impertinent pushes toward his wife who stands
Tolerant of child’s play, waiting for her to be done.
His mother says ‘I wish he had not got it. It is wicked-looking.
I tell you: Put it down!’
His wife says ‘All right, Mary: let me have it–it is mine.’
Saucily pouting, primly frowning
The sister clangs bayonet on table; walks out
And her mother follows.
Like a live thing in not-to-be-trusted stillness,
Like a kind of engine so foreign and self-possessed
As to chill her momently between worship and terror
It lies there waiting alone in the room with her,
Oddly familiar without ever losing strangeness.
Slowly she moves along it a tentative finger
As though to measure and remember its massive, potent length:
Death-deep, tall as life,
For here prized from the enemy, wrenched away captive, his
dangerous escape and hers.
Mary his wife
Lifts it heavy and wonderful in her hands and with triumphant
tenderness.
– – –
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