Valeria 1991

Softened by Time’s consummate plush,
How sleek the woe appears
That threatened childhood’s citadel
And undermined the years!
Emily Dickinson, #LV

The black night rose and fell on a festive
and bedazzled Munich, when black and white
news sang of medals and eleven-captives.
When my world was threatening to ignite
you were there to give respite from the flame.
They say, “There are no havens from the curse.”
but you put the lie to their little game.
While olympians bled upon their course,
You were always my rock, a heaven’s rest.
Gathered under your wings, I was safely
sheltered from a great towering tempest.
Amid the blood of a dying fam’ly,
Amid the blood of a fighting nation,
With you there was peace without privation.

Photo by Abdel Rahman Abu Baker on Pexels.com

”The black night rose and fell on a festive / and bedazzled Munich, when black and white / news sang of medals and eleven-captives.”

These three lines refer to the 1972 Munich Olympics and the Israelis murdered and taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists known as “Black September”. It seems we have not moved far from that Munich morning. Pray for those mourning so many.

Are we entering a time of rampant violence, dehumanization, ignorance, and strife? We don’t know where to stand for we don’t believe in our ability to stand for anything. We are reeds in the wind.

“We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men”¹ … and we fail to whimper.

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table —
Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy. (New York: John Lane Company, 1909), 56.

T. S. Eliot ” The Hollow Men”, 1925. ↩︎

United States, War Department. Atlas to Accompany the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1891 (2 vols.).

history, poems, poetry

Morning’s Maul

Some nights…
Naomi Shihab Nye,“Hello”

Some mornings shy at the dawn,
some claw the night to death.
We slid into Friday
like a Sunday afternoon.

But soon it baked
our clay in blood.

Mid-seven,
Mr. Jones scattered
all the birds
with his caw,

while the dust danced
down sunlit slides
and the morning
mauled
the dawn.

Postscript:

July 3, 1863 “The town of Gettysburg looked as if some universal moving day had been interrupted by catastrophe.” But there was only one documented civilian death during the battle: Ginnie Wade (also widely known as Jennie), 20 years old, was hit by a stray bullet that passed through her kitchen in town while she was making bread.
Bruce Catton

July 1-3, 1863, one-hundred and fifty-eight years ago, the Battle of Gettysburg began and resulted in the largest casualties of the American Civil War.

The Battle of Gettysburg resulted in eight-thousand men killed in combat; these bodies, baking in the heat of summer, needed to be buried quickly. Over three-thousand horse carcasses were burned in a series of piles south of town; townsfolk became violently ill from the stench. Meanwhile, the town of Gettysburg, with its population of just two-thousand, found itself tasked with taking care of fourteen-thousand wounded Union troops and an additional eight-thousand Confederate prisoners.

According to lore, the Union soldier to fire the first shot of the battle of Gettysburg was Lt. Marcellus Jones.

Civil War era soldiers – photographer unknown circa 1865

L. Prang & Co. lithograph of the painting "Hancock at Gettysburg" by Thure de Thulstrup, showing Pickett's Charge. Restoration by Adam Cuerden. — L. Prang & Co. lithograph of the painting “Hancock at Gettysburg” by Thure de Thulstrup, showing Pickett’s Charge. Restoration by Adam Cuerden.

poems, poetry

Widow’s Walk

I have seen a widow’s walk
where seven gables point the sky,
and I have stared at chalk
hoping to draw the perfect I.

But why?
Why set my feet where Hawthorne trod?
Why practice to marry eye to hand?
Why collect all those marks
set to paper, board or ageless cloth?
Why wonder at the ephemeral moth?