Last september

[cydira]

Good evening (at least that is what the time here on the Eastern seaboard is when I am posting this).

The events of September 11th last year evoked very strong emotions in all of us. If you have read my addition to the memorial thread, you will see that I quoted two poems. I collected these and several others in the days following the terrorist attcks and in the days surrounding the beginnings of military action in Afghanistan.

I have decided to share this little collection with you. Perhaps it will give some insight into how the atrocities that we have witnessed impacted this particular patriot.

May your house and home be safe; may your kinfolk and friends who are far from you return safely; may we live long, prosper, and live in peace. This is my blessing for all the world, even those who have struck out at the United States. Perhaps it will be only with such blessings and the determination to resist the urges of malevolance against our breathren will we put an end to such atrocities as terrorism, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.

[cydira]

Year that trembled and reel?d beneath me!
You summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken?d me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? Said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?

Drum-Taps
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

~@~

Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face,
Terror, the Human Form Divine,
And Secrecy, the Human Dress

The Human Dress is forged Iron,
The Human Form, a fiery Forge,
The Human Face, a Furnace seal?d,
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

A Divine Image
William Blake

~@~

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke with out flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War?s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

In Time of ?The Breaking of Nations?
Thomas Hardy

~@~

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,
The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?
Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate.-
Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?
Crudely renewed, the Salient holds its own.
Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;
Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,
The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world?s worst wound. And here with pride
?Their name liveth for ever,? the Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulcher of crime.

On Passing the New Menin Gate
Siegfried Sassoon

~@~

The darkness crumbles away.
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet?s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver-what heart aghast?
Poppies whos roots are in man?s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe-
Just a little white with the dust.

Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg

~@~

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tied is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

~@~

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Fire and Ice
Robert Frost