this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war
we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgment
we have no sympathy for the devil.
we acknowledge the power to act that is in us
images and poem below the fold
A injured man stands at the scene of a roadside bomb attack in Baghdad, December 22, 2006.
(Mohammed Ameen/Reuters)
US Army soldier Daniel Alderman, a single amputee of the 25th Infantry Division, ices his leg as he waits for his prosthetic limb to be adjusted at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, 21 December 2006. Alderman keeps telling himself it could be worse as he learns to live with his new artificial limb.
(AFP/Jim Watson)
Dolphin
by Robert Lowell
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman’s-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself–
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
