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

images and poem below the fold

Iraqi boys watch two women whose daughter and sister was killed in an attack, grieve outside the Kindi hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006. Suspected insurgents set off a car bomb to stop a minibus carrying Shiite government employees in Baghdad, then shot and killed 15 of them, the government said.
(AP Photo/Samir Mizban)


Relatives of the late Philippine-born U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Richwell Doria attend his funeral in Dagupan city, 180 kilometers (112 miles) north of Manila, Philippines, on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2006. Doria was killed Nov. 7 near Kirkuk, Iraq by small-arms fire during an air assault and rescue mission, the embassy said in a statement.
(AP Photo)

Bog Myrtle V
by Pansy Maurer-Alvarez

from a series of coiled basket forms
by Anna S. King, textile artist

Take bog myrtle

    that unprepossessing marshland shrub

        with a beautiful aroma when crushed

Put under the brow bands of childhood ponies

    to keep the flies away and now a reminder

        of weekends on the west coast of Scotland

Bunches brought back to work with

    aware of the option of holding something back

        when lost in the hypnotic rhythm of weaving

               *

I push the energy of contemplation from mind into fingers

to this concentration of textures    centrifugally formed:

pine needles woven with waxed cotton;

sprigs of bog myrtle   stand encircling the form

their tips rising above the central hollow of the basket–

that space

    containing   and    concealing

    or offering you a place to release

        your disturbingly secretive

        self

        to yourself

– – – –

“Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone.

I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening.

But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.

And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired.

Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.

At least I think that’s so.”

from the play Angels in America, by Tony Kushner
via The Rude Pundit