“[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.

– – –
Join CIVIC’s “I Care” photo campaign

put a meaningful magnet on your car or metal filing cabinet

read Ilona’s important new blog – PTSD Combat

view the pbs newshour silent honor roll (with thanks to jimstaro at booman.)

take a private moment to light one candle among many (with thanks to TXSharon)

support Veterans for Peace
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
remember the fallen
support Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors – TAPS
support Gold Star Families for Peace
support the fallen
support the troops
support Iraq Veterans Against the War
support Military families Speak Out
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
witness every day

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