“[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.
image and poem below the fold
An Iraqi woman sits at a local hospital beside the corpse of a relative killed in a car bomb attack in Baghdad. Fifteen people were killed in a car bomb attack in the Shiite holy city of Karbala and police uncovered the bodies of dozens of murdered men as Iraq remained engulfed in sectarian violence.
(AFP/Sabah Arar)
from The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket
by Robert Lowell
(For Warren Winslow, Dead At Sea)
Let man have dominion over the fishes of the sea and
the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth,
and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.
VII
The empty winds are creaking and the oak
splatters and splatters on the cenotaph,
The boughs are trembling and a gaff
Bobs on the untimely stroke
Of the greased wash exploding on a shoal-bell
In the old mouth of the Atlantic. It’s well;
Atlantic, you are fouled with the blue sailors,
sea-monsters, upward angel, downward fish:
Unmarried and corroding, spare of flesh
Mart once of supercilious, wing’d clippers,
Atlantic, where your bell-trap guts its spoil
You could cut the brackish winds with a knife
Here in Nantucket, and cast up the time
When the Lord God formed man from the sea’s slime
And breathed into his face the breath of life,
And blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill.
The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.
– – –
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” I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
from Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
.
MOGADISHU, SOMALIA (AFP) – Islamist militants have been gaining the upper hand in fighting in Mogadishu and now control roughly 80 percent of the Somali capital, according to a UN Security Council report.
The council panel which monitors the UN arms embargo on Somalia released its report as fresh fighting raged in lawless Mogadishu between Islamist militants and gunmen loyal to a US-backed alliance of warlords.
Both groups are opposed to the establishment of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) as a central government.
Machine gun, artillery and rocket fire echoed through the city’s streets after a ceasefire called by Islamic courts collapsed.
The UN report said the warlords alliance had been “severely degraded” by a series of bloody fights with the Islamic militants, who managed to strengthen their hold over large areas formerly held by the warlords.
The recent Mogadishu fighting pits the fundamentalists against the US-backed Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism (ARPCT). The newly-formed alliance has vowed to curb the growing influence of the Islamic courts that have gained backing by restoring a semblance of stability to areas in Mogadishu by enforcing Sharia (Islamic) law.
The UN report made it clear that all warring factions — the TFG, the fundamentalists and the warlord alliance — are supported by other unnamed states. “The clandestine support of individual states is narrowly defined and motivated by self-interest,” it said. “As a result, the (UN) Monitoring Group sees no end to the trend of continued clandestine state support and, therefore, no end to the ongoing militarization in the near future.”
The Islamic militants were said to be using foreign fighters as well as shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons and to have overrun APRCT territory, killing or capturing alliance militia members.
Somalia has been without a functioning central government for nearly 15 years and has been wracked by warlord-fuelled violence since the 1991 ouster of strongman Mohamad Siad Barre.
● At Least 96 Killed in Somali Fighting
● Somaliland Times
≈ Cross-posted from my diary — Economic Siege Imposed on the Palestinians ≈
LEAVE Iraq to the Iraqis
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Peace
Deadly Deception at an Iraqi Market
…and a warm embrace for you.
…and more from me little sister.
Three more soldiers died today. I think it is time to tell Flyboy that he should go over and fight the “war on terror”. Or the Twins huh? Then who will he ask to be the last to die?
Impeachment is the Answer!