May 15, 2004
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Sharing this poem by greybellycloud this morning. It’s the best I’ve seen on the war so far.
50 Miles from BaghdadSandstorms swirl about you, making you sick
for the banjo rain, sick for the barefoot girl
running on pastured hills as if life were a joke.Sick of this exercise in empire, sick of these patriot
games, you long for the days of lemonade,
a broad front porch, and swinging in the late afternoon.“My country, right or wrong” is a madman’s creed, written
in the blood of a thousand fathers who will never see
the newborn child or wipe the tears of a hometown bride.
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Deep Thought: Every summer we’d get our baskets and buckets and go out into the hills and woods, looking for wild strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries. We never found any, though.
Today I am grateful for: Home
Comments (4)
just dropped by to say hello.
I’m glad you ended on a good note.
I feel something of a detachment of the war while at the same time being against it. I am by nature against all fighting, I think. Strange as I was quite the bully throughout middle school and onto my first year of high school. Ah, clutching at straws when we think we’re about to fall, I guess.
Call me an ex-patriate in training but I itch to leave here. Again, not even for whatever war or whatever ideal or whatever, just because. For me to say that America was completely a wash would be just as bad as someone saying all Muslims are evil and should be gassed. I just can’t understand such thinking. There’s plenty of good in this country, in the world, but it doesn’t get the big splash headlines, it’s not sensational. And so we keep slowly being fed that which is going to progressively rot our brains.
Man, I have no idea where all that came from. Good poem there.
Thanks for writing that much about it. It would seem that most Americans (if I can judge by xanga as a microculture) are detached. I’m not so surprised that folks with no specific loved one in the war are detached, but I guess it keeps surprising me that the families of those who are killed or maimed do not speak up. Except to say how proud they are that their loved one died for their country.