“[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 – today for Jill Carroll and her family

cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, and My Left Wing.

april is national poetry month

images and poem below the fold

An Iraqi man carries the body of a child who was shot in a drive-by shooting in a market Monday April 3, 2006 in Basra, Iraq. Drive-by shooters killed six people included a navy officer, two policemen, two workers at an electrical plant, and a boy, police said, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw urged Iraqi leaders to form a government as soon as possible to curb the bloodshed and rein in sectarian militias behind much of the country’s violence.
(AP Photo/Nabil al-Jurani)


Freed U.S. hostage Jill Carroll (L) is greeted by family members, including her sister Katie (C), and parents Jim (UNSEEN) and Mary Beth Carroll after the freelance journalist returned to Boston, Massachusetts, April 2, 2006. Carroll, 28, a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor held captive in Iraq for 82 days, returned home to the U.S. on Sunday for a reunion with her family whose emotional appeals rallied a global campaign for her freedom. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY NO SALES NO ARCHIVES REUTERS/Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor/Handout

from the Iliad book 4, lines 473-89
by Homer
Lattimore’s translation courtesy of astraea, who says, “One of the things I love about the Iliad is the care it takes to memorialize the dead. The character Simoeisios is mentioned only once, when he is killed. No one in the Iliad is a mere number.”

There Telamonian Aias struck down the son of Anthemion
Simoeisios in his stripling’s beauty, whom once his mother
descending from Ida bore beside the banks of Simoeis
when she had followed her father and mother to tend the sheepflocks.
Therefore they called him Simoeisios; but he could not
render again the care of his dear parents; he was short-lived,
beaten down beneath the spear of high-hearted Aias,
who struck him as he first came forward beside the nipple
of the right breast, and the bronze spearhead drove clean through the shoulder.
He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with branches growing at the uttermost tree-top,
one whom a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining
iron, to bend it into a wheel for a fine-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening by the banks of a river.
Such was Anthemion’s son Simoeisios, whom illustrious
Aias killed.

– – –
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