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
cross-posted at MyLeftWing, BooMan Tribune, and my blog.
image and poem below the fold
A firefighter tries to extinguish a fire amid rubble just after a suicide car bomb exploded in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, March 5, 2007. A suicide car bomber struck near the well-known Mutanabi book market in central Baghdad Monday, killing at least 26 people and injuring more than 50, in a first major blast in the city in several days, police said.
(AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
Love Affair with Firearms
by Medbh McGuckian
From behind the moon boys’ graves
bleed endlessly; from photograph
to browning photograph they blacken
headlines, stranded outside of time
at the story’s frigid edge.
Though they are long buried
in French soil, we are still speaking
of trenches, of who rose, who fell,
who merely hung on. The morning drills
secretly, like an element that absorbs.
We are right back where we were
before the world turned over,
the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone
are all that Sunday means. Their North
was not ‘The North that never was’.
Artemis, protector of virgins, shovels up
fresh pain with the newly-wed
long-stemmed roses, pressing two worlds
like a wedding kiss upon another Margaret:
lip-Irish and an old family ring.
It’s like asking for grey
when that colour is not recognised,
or changes colour from friend to friend.
I track the muse through subwoods, curse
the roads, but cannot write the kiss.
– – –
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