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
image and poem below the fold
A relative of Zuheir Ali, grieves over his body in Baqouba, 60 kilometers (35 miles) northeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, Dec. 23, 2006. Ali and his two sons Ibrahim Zuheir and Abbas Zuheir, Sunni Muslims, were abducted and killed by unknown gunmen after being warned to leave the area where they resided.
(AP Photo/Asaad Mouhsin)
Christmas: 1915
by Percy MacKaye
Now is the midnight of the nations: dark
Even as death, beside her blood-dark seas,
Earth, like a mother in birth agonies,
Screams in her travail, and the planets hark
Her million-throated terror. Naked, stark,
Her torso writhes enormous, and her knees
Shudder against the shadowed Pleiades
Wrenching the night’s imponderable arc.
Christ! What shall be delivered to the morn
Out of these pangs, if ever indeed another
Morn shall succeed this night, or this vast mother
Survive to know the blood-spent offspring, torn
From her racked flesh?–What splendour from the smother?
What new-wing’d world, or mangled god still-born?
