Those four conditions that are waiting in the wings for Bush’s war funding request are a big slap in the face to the administration.

Thanks, Peterr, for the poetry stream and for alerting us to the above. Hooray that the House is doing it’s thing; but only if it’s a first step toward starting the impeachment process.
But, dear Lord, please hurry it all up and let the killing and lieing stop soon. Lord have mercy.

Sweet Savior; can we be so bold as to ever expect someone like them again?

This man couldn’t even remember this simple, yet meaningful tidbit
Fool me once, shame on you,
Fool me twice shame on, me

Salute to the poets.

THE PEN AND THE SWORD
from the News Hour with Jim Leher on Monday, April 5, 1999

Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States, contemplates war.

ROBERT PINSKY: With armed conflict and suffering and evidence of atrocity in the news this April, which is also poetry month, an old question emerges again: What use or relevance does poetry have in the face of large-scale political disaster or evil ? The Polish poet, Ceslav Milos, who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, has said that in those days even the most tinted person by carrying in a pocket some poetry in the Polish language could register a small, stubborn particle of resistance. And in his poem “Incantation” Milos gives a bold, resonating answer to the question of poetry’s significance. As the title “Incantation” suggests, the poem is a kind of prayer, less a description of the world as it is at any moment than the world as it will be or as it is at some ultimate core. Here is the poem in an English version that I made with the author.

INCANTATION

(Czeslaw Milosz)

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo,
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit,
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

–Czeslaw Milosz, trans. Robert Pinsky & the author

Thanks for the antiwar poetry thread. Here are some poems that were submitted to me shortly after the war began. I was looking for lyrics about Rachel Corrie or about issues she could have identified with had she lived. I received dozens. There have been hundreds of poems and scores of songs written about her. I used these:

Around you the father gods war. This
Father. That father. The other father.

What more dangerous place could
A woman stand, upright, than on that sand, as if
She were still antiphon to that voice, the other
Mind of that power. The very idea!

Crush her back in to her mother!
Crush her. Crush her. Consensus. War.
- Linda McCarriston

The skies are weeping

The birds have flown away
With rain-sodden flowers in hand
I wait for you, Rachel…

The rain drops trickle
Washing the scent off the mourning tulips
Pounding the healing earth
The howling winds and trembling blades of grass
Calling for you, Rachel…

Dust dancing around my knees
Walling me in, and my grief
From the weeping heavens faintly at first
I hear you, Rachel…

You give strength to my tears
And resolve to my limbs
As I stand up with my broken tulips
The skies are clearing
The earth is sprouting fresh blades of grass
That whisper your name, Rachel…

The winds are gentle
Reassuring in their calmness
Heaven and earth rejoice today
As you’re with me again, Rachel…
– Thushara Wijeratna

Rachel’s Words (edited by Philip Munger)
Feel sick to my stomach a lot
from being doted on all the time,
very sweetly,
by people who are facing doom.

You can always hear the tanks and bulldozers
passing by.
I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers
outside our house
and you and me inside.
Tanks and bulldozers destroyed 25 greenhouses
the livelihoods for 300 people.
Then the bulldozers come and take out
people’s vegetable farms and gardens.

This happens every day.

I think that I should at least mention that
I am also discovering a degree of strength
and of basic ability for humans to remain human
in the direst of circumstances.

I think the word is dignity.

I wish you could meet these people.

Maybe, hopefully, someday
you will.

Oklahoma kiddo @ 45

Arianna is doing a pillory Hillary thing again today. This woman Arianna, not only hits a home run each time she’s up at bat, she drives in three bases-are-loaded runs. Amazing.

And I’ll take Bob Somerby’s word before Arianna’s.

Every time.

quite frankly hilary sounds totally cuckoo concerning iran.

anyone remember what I’m talking about?

“Don’t mess with the poets”? Puh-lease!

When I first started blogging back in the bleak days of 2003, this was one of my first links.
Still hilarious, and utterly offensive, 4 years later.

If this is what you were linking to, I can see why you called your blogging days of 2003 “bleak.” You don’t have to agree with me or anyone else around here, but a little thoughtful commentary would be appreciated.

When I first started blogging back in the bleak days of 2003, this was one of my first links.
Still hilarious, and utterly offensive, 4 years later.

Kipling’s pithy bitterness re: World War I was partly inspired by the loss of his only son in that combat.

What are these words that ask for peace
jeweled words, rubied and pearled,
that stroke one’s conscience.
Who says these words?
Who listens? Who hears?
Humbly, Congress bows it’s head
before it votes
for Trident submarines
and mx missiles.
Like little boys,
they eagerly await
their star wars game-
their very own.
Bloated with puffed up power
they pray for peace
and plan for war.

L. Varner