“[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, My Left Wing, and TexasKos.
april is national poetry month
image and poem below the fold
Relatives and friends of Nicola Ciardelli, a paratrooper with the Italian Army killed by a bomb blast attack in Nasiriyah, southern Iraq, are seen in front of his family house in Avellino, near Naples, Thursday, April, 27, 2006. A bomb blast rocked an Italian convoy at a base in southern Iraq on Thursday, killing four people, three Italians and one Romanian, the Italian Defense Ministry said in a statement. The ministry identified the Italians killed as Nicola Ciardelli, a paratrooper with the Italian Army, Franco Lattanzio and Carlo De Trizio, warrant officers with the Carabinieri paramilitary police. Romania’s Defense Ministry confirmed the death of the Romanian soldier, but said the soldiers were killed when an explosives-laden car drove into the armored vehicle.
(AP Photo/Salvatore Laporta)
Iraqi women weep for the sister of Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, and her bodyguard, Saad Ali, who were shot dead by gunmen Thursday April 27, 2006 in Baghdad, Iraq. Mayson Ahmed Bakir al-Hashimi, 60, the sister of Iraq’s new Sunni Arab vice president was killed in a drive-by shooting, one day after her brother called for the Sunni-dominated insurgency to be crushed by force.
(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
To the Reader: If You Asked Me
by Chase Twichell
I want you with me, and yet you are the end
of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms
have become public? How we glance to see if–
who? Who did you imagine?
Surely we’re not here alone, you and I.
I’ve been wandering
where the cold tracks of language
collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.
Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold
of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.
If you asked me what words
a voice like this one says in parting,
I’d say, I’m sweeping an empty factory
toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia.
I’m just a broom, sweeping.
– – –
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