this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters
we honor courage in all its forms
we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgement.
cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, My Left Wing, and TexasKos.
two images and poem below the fold
Family members cry as a Marine honor guard carries the body of Cpl. Ryan Cummings, who was killed in Iraq, from his funeral to a hearse in Schaumburg, Illinois, June 13, 2006.
REUTERS/John Gress (UNITED STATES)
Iraqi women mourn as they sit near stains of blood at the site where a car bomb exploded in the northern city of Kirkuk. At least 36 people were killed across Iraq, including 18 in a bombing campaign in the oil city of Kirkuk, as US President George W. Bush made a surprise five-hour visit to Baghdad.
(AFP/Marwan Ibrahim)
Birdcall
by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
–for Elizabeth Bishop
Tuwee, calls a bird near the house,
Tuwee, cries another, downhill in the woods.
No wind, early September, beeches and pines,
Sumac aflame, tuwee, tuwee, a question and a faint
But definite response, tuwee, tuwee, as if engaged
In a conversation expected to continue all afternoon,
Where is?–I’m here?–an upward inflection in
Query and in response, a genetic libretto rehearsed
Tens of thousands of years beginning to leave its indelible trace,
Clawprint of language, ritual, dense winged seed,
Or as someone were slowly buttoning a shirt.
I am happy to lie in the grass and listen, as if at the dawn of reason,
To the clear communal command
That is flinging creaturely will into existence,
Designing itself to desire survival,
Liberty, companionship,
Then the bird near me, my bird, stops inquiring, while the other
Off in the woods continues calling faintly, but with that upward
Inflection, I’m here, I’m here,
I’m here, here, the call opens a path through boughs still clothed
By foliage, until it sounds like entreaty, like anxiety, like life
Imitating the pivotal move of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle,”
Where the lovebird’s futile song to its absent mate teaches the child
Death–which the ocean also whispers–
Death, death, death it softly whispers,
Like an old crone bending aside over a cradle, Whitman says,
Or the like the teapot in Elizabeth Bishop’s grandmother’s kitchen,
Here at one end of the chain of being,
That whistles a song of presence and departure,
Creating comfort but also calling for tears.
– – –
join CIVIC’s “I Care” photo campaign
support Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
put a meaningful magnet on your car or metal filing cabinet
read Ilona’s important blog – PTSD Combat
view the pbs newshour silent honor roll (with thanks to jimstaro at booman.)
take a private moment to light one candle among many (with thanks to TXSharon)
support Veterans for Peace
support the Iraqi people
support the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC)
support CARE
support the victims of torture
remember the fallen
support Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors – TAPS
support Gold Star Families for Peace
support the fallen
support the troops
support Iraq Veterans Against the War
support Military families Speak Out
support the troops and the Iraqi people
read This is what John Kerry did today, the diary by lawnorder that prompted this series
read Riverbend’s Bagdhad Burning
read Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
read Today in Iraq
witness every day
While speaking at the YearlyKos 2006 Convention in Los Vegas, former Virginia Governor Mark Warner said (and I paraphrase from memory): “George Bush, incompetent idiot, blah blah blah, went to war in Iraq when the real threat is in Iran.” (my emphasis)
There was a brief pause after his statement, and I regret that I wasn’t brave or quick-witted enough to yell “Bullshit!” into the silence. But the moment passed, Warner picked up his next thread in perfect cadence, and I bit into my box lunch apple.
So now what?
I’m gonna let him know that I think his statement is bullshit, and why. I’m starting here. If anyone knows of other ways, please put them in this thread.
Thanks.
The candle that DianeL first lit many months ago, and which has become such an important part of these diaries since, is still available here.
You can copy that image into your own comment (you can leave it on my server), craft your own image, and/or rate this one – not for mojo, but to leave a small mark after taking this moment – as a sign that you know, but do not approve, and are not resigned.
“It is like trying to ignite – to pass on the responsibilities as much as possible to everyone else.”
Ravi Shankar
Peace takes courage
peace
Bombing kills 4 amid Baghdad crackdown
since George declared “Mission Accomplished”.
Impeach the Idiot in Chief!
OMG.
I wrote a whole diary about how his party struck me the wrong way… and now this. I surely hope you keep this in your Daily War Grief postings for some time.
I feel so helpless. If the cat’s stuck in a tree, I can get it down. I can roll the window up to keep rain off the children.
But what can I do about this? After pondering quite some minutes, I think of nothing….
Save to recommend this book, which talks about how George Bush is a manifestation of a global mental dysfunction, global epidemic, our dark side made manifest.
If we can at least recognize that on a conscious level, doesn’t it give us some important information to work with? I mean, pivotal information, that might help us find a way out of this seemingly endless cycle of war?
The Madness of George W. Bush — A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis, by Paul Levy:
here, or if this link doesn’t work, google, etc.:
http://www.addall.com/New/compare.cgi?dispCurr=USD&id=349695&isbn=142590744X&location=10
000&thetime=20060614142332&author=&title=&state=AK
Light A Candle For
Peace, Tolerance, Understanding
and For The Children – Innocence Lost!
Apologies for the tardiness of the Spring ’06 edition of the Poets Against
War newsletter, and profound apologies for the problems we’ve had in recent
months with Poems of the Month and with the Poetry Matters section. Most of
these headaches have been technical and have finally been resolved, thanks
to the very generous support and contributions of David Habib, Colin Foden
and Jill Beaumont. Other problems arose over shifting personnel: Sally
Anderson, our devoted editor and organizer from Day One, and Barbara Bowen,
who gave us a couple of tireless years, have both been called by demands of
their personal lives and will rejoin us somewhere down the road, I’m sure.
Meanwhile, we are adding new volunteer editors to make those sections both
current and more rewarding, and we will further expand the Board of
Directors to help assure our stability in the future.
The Spring and Summer issues of the Poets Against War Newsletter have been
combined. We have new editors for Poems of the Month (Courtney Hudak and
Nancy Flynn), and board member Sarah Browning has taken over as volunteer
coordinator and liaison with other organizations. We hope to work much more
closely with like-minded political organizations in this election year, and
to motivate our membership to take an active role and make Poets Against
War a meaningful presence.
We will soon be adding personnel to greatly expand and develop our Links
and Poetry Matters sections to make them much more useful resources and
extend our communications base. And I have a volunteer or two for further
developing this newsletter.
The feature essay in the new issue is Breyten Breytenbach’s “Imagine
Africa,” a call for us all to take a moment to reconsider Africa and what
we might do to help those who suffer most.
In the next week or two we will also post Prabal Kumar Basu’s brief history
of Bengali poetry of the last century. He has sent out a formal call to the
poets of India to form a Poets Against War organization there, and I’m sure
that we will all benefit from increased knowledge, communication and
cooperation in the difficult days to come.
*
If you have not already done so, I hope you will join the board of
directors and members of Poets Against War in visiting the
VotersForPeace.us web page and signing the pledge not to support any
candidate who supports wars of aggression. We can send an important message
to the Democratic Party by signing the pledge, and we must remember that
the Democratic Party is the party of Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton. It
is also the party of Dennis Kucinich, Jim McDermott, John Conyers, Maxine
Waters, and Marcy Kaptur and other friends in the House and Senate who
welcomed and supported us in our outcry before the war. Many of them
entered our poems into the Congressional Record. It is possible to make the
Democratic Party more responsive to our needs and demands.
*
I ask you to join us in supporting Lt. Ehren Watada, the Fort Lewis army
lieutenant who has struggled bravely with his crises of conscience and
ultimately attempted to resign from the army once he found out he could not
be reclassified as a Conscientious Objector because he is not opposed to
all wars, only, apparently, to illegal and immoral ones. He had refused to
ship out to Iraq with his unit, declaring, “I refuse to be silent any
longer. I refuse to watch families torn apart while the President tells us
to ‘stay the course.’ I refuse to be party to an illegal and immoral war
against people who did nothing to deserve our aggression.”
Surely Lt. Watada understands that he will become a target of right-wing
fanatics, will be savaged on Fox news and in right-wing newspapers; he also
realizes the army will charge and try him, and probably do its best to make
an example of him. He is probably headed for prison and a bad conduct
discharge. His courage in taking a moral stand at great personal cost is
exemplary. He stands in striking contrast to the chickenhawk pseudo-
Christians responsible for the on-going bloodshed in Iraq.
*
Columbia University Press has published an important anthology, American
War Poetry, edited by Lorrie Goldensohn. While some of the omissions are
confounding (Why are Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Conscientious Objector” and
Galway Kinnell’s “Vapor Trail Reflected in a Frog Pond” not included? And
it is clearly a university anthology, which is to say establishmentarian in
its tastes), it is, nevertheless, a decent survey of war poetry-pro, con,
and sometimes almost indiscernibly between those two-of our country.
Organized war by war, none of the modern wars that the U.S.A initiated in
Central or South American is even mentioned. Only El Salvador. Governments
overthrown at the behest of Standard Oil or the United Fruit Company
apparently do not qualify as wars. Support for the Trujillos, Batistas,
Pinochets and Noriegas and their death squads don’t count-just U.S.
business as usual. The Drug Wars that have devastated Columbia and its
neighbors aren’t really wars. The dead go uncounted. Our friends in the
South remember that Kissinger, Bush Sr. and friends overthrew the duly
elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile on September 11, 1973. Ike
and Patton were lieutenants in Pershing’s army that marched against Pancho
Villa. The U.S. penchant for obliterating every attempt at agrarian reform
south of its border-anywhere south of its border-for a hundred years is a
war. Millions of people still suffer its consequences. Despite such serious
problems, I recommend this groundbreaking work for its historical as well
as its literary value. The evolution of styles and stances is remarkable.
*
“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he
must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and
pleasures of his species must become his own.” -Shelley, “In Defense of
Poetry”
*
“If there is a humanistic view about the mission of Art, this, I believe,
is the only way it can be understood: like an invisible operation, which is
a facsimile of the mechanism we call Justice-and naturally I am not talking
about the Justice of the courts but about the other Justice, which is
consummated slowly and equally painfully in the teachings of the great
magistrates of mankind, in the political struggles for social liberation
and in the loftiest poetic accomplishments. From such a great effort, the
drops of light fall slowly every now and then into the vast night of the
soul like lemon drops into polluted water.” -Odysseas Elytis, Open Book
*
The following poem is by Salah Al Hamdani, an Iraqi poet who escaped
Sadam’s reign to live in exile in Paris for the last thirty years. A year
ago, he managed to return to his beloved Baghdad and visit his family for
the first time. His remarkable memoir and poetry, Exile & Return, is
translated from the French by Sonia Alland, and from Arabic into French by
the poet and his companion, Isabelle Lagny. It will be published in the
U.S. eventually by Curbstone Press.
Here, from Baghdad,
we say to you that we are alive
I didn’t know that the palms, assassinated, would arise again
accompany the prisoners’ souls
and walk together towards the day
I say that it’s fright
when, in waves, my eyes weave
straw houses
with Baghdad, in the distance
a mirage of fire
I say it’s Autumn
when I hoist my skin
strand my writings
without weight or wind
Yes
the sky of Iraq
without Saddam
is blue!
I say it’s Spring
in spite of the war among clans
when I anchor the sun
and absurdity makes happiness iridescent
I think sometimes of us,
of that other existence
with which you’ve papered my home
of that affecting sky
of those memories that are kindled
when I open the notebook of time
of that river that slumbers in the clay
At the coming of dawn,
from your inner storm
where the thirst to vanquish
was to have surged forth
I stepped over your body and the acid sand,
then with violence
the rocky ground seized hold of me
Drawn by the desert
I also wandered along your banks
moving over the immense obscurity of your flesh
and the incandescent silence of prayers
Then the soul, like a stork in the river
moored itself
in the drunkenness of the dune…
I’ve supped of your sky until I’ve cried out
I’ve drowned your wounds in my rough drafts
long governed by distress
by fearful nights
To return or not to return?
I’ve wandered the multiple days of our existence
my imagining refreshed…
On this invented line, this country of stones
this frontier twisting through a hamlet
along an abandoned road
where pirate-men cross in the dark
I felt the anguish of the condemned
but there was no door to close against the wind
My only dread,
that night,
was to be lost along the interminable path
never again to see my mother…
I followed the Euphrates and its waters calcinated with the dead
For a long time, I stirred the cinders
turning them to flames
without forgetting to render the cadavers
and the names of the executed, beautiful
Your sky was desert
My being was immersed in the crowd
when your sun purified the houses
and the ruins of the war
And while the soldiers slaked their thirst with our tears
I helped you endure your night of stupefying fever
I ran to you, in spite of the smoke of the occupier
and the ever present torture of tyrants
to cover your nakedness with my memory…
And the night suddenly set its body on mine
under the carpet of stars flooding the eye
How will I ever be able to tame this shuddering?
Thus you knew the pangs of death
the drowning of your history and the blood-letting of your days…
“Yes, from Baghdad, we say to you that we are alive!
“So leave us our crescent moon,
the laughter of the light
and the hair of our women, brushing our face
as they lean over us…”
Here I am Baghdad
inhabited by the scars of exile
I pass through you, confronting my tormented childhood
my voice inaudible
Perhaps I see standing midst your mirage
a mirage, my love, existing since the god, Shamash *
wove his light on your back
incarnate now in the mild heat
that captures the murmur of your headless palms
In your great souk, without geometry
a hamlet in the city’s heart
breathing the certainty of spacious things
a dizziness nourishes my passionate, fleeting gaze
Everything is made for man and for light’s transparency
in spite of the trace left by days of tears and the imprint of tyranny.
If you were a woman, Baghdad
you would be my river of sorrow
and I would know the dying of love
I would at last see your immense eyelids
amidst a store of solitude
where no one knows us
but love is learned from taking measure of life
from man’s hate
from death, as well
Baghdad-Damas-Paris. April 11, 2004
I posted this Flash Video a short while ago, Mark has passed it on to Veterans For Peace board for Listening and Viewing, It Deserves the Re-View!!
I’d give you the Video direct link but click on the Site Link, read what is written, than download and view the Very Well Done Flash Video and Great Song!!
Peace!!!
~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~
Subject: why billy why
Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:31:02 EDT
my name is mark grayson i am a song writer from sarasota,
florida….in light of Bush’s comments this morning it is obvious he has no
intention of withdrawing our troop from iraq. On the contrary they are stepping
up their efforts in both iraq and afghanistan.
I don’t believe our government has the right to ask anybody to die for democracy
in Iraq. I thought you guys might appreciate this song i wrote last year when my
son-in-law was deployed to iraq.
‘why billy why’ is an honest look at a mother’s loss. It carries a strong message
and reflects what most americans are feeling right about now.
i am going to attach a copy of the video to this email in case you would like a
version you can download….otherwise you can view the video in it’s entirety by
simply going to Why Billy Why
please feel free to share ‘why billy why’ with all your chapters…friends…and
members. you are welcome to post it on your webpage….or a link to my site.
Thank you for your contribution to end the war…pray for peace….mark