Sunday, May 24, 2009

Memorial Day


Poetry of Wilfred Owen

Wild with all Regrets

(Another version of "A Terre".)

To Siegfried Sassoon

My arms have mutinied against me -- brutes!
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats,My back's been stiff for hours, damned hours.
Death never gives his squad a Stand-at-ease.I can't read. There: it's no use. Take your book.

A short life and a merry one, my buck!

We said we'd hate to grow dead old. But now,Not to live old seems awful: not to renewMy boyhood with my boys, and teach 'em hitting,Shooting and hunting, -- all the arts of hurting!--

Well, that's what I learnt. That, and making money.
Your fifty years in store seem none too many;
But I've five minutes. God! For just two years
To help myself to this good air of yours!
One Spring! Is one too hard to spare? Too long?
Spring air would find its own way to my lung,
And grow me legs as quick as lilac-shoots.

Yes, there's the orderly.

He'll change the sheets
When I'm lugged out, oh, couldn't I do that?
Here in this coffin of a bed, I've thought
I'd like to kneel and sweep his floors for ever, --And ask no nights off when the bustle's over,
For I'd enjoy the dirt; who's prejudiced

Against a grimed hand when his own's quite dust, --Less live than specks that in the sun-shafts turn?

Dear dust, -- in rooms, on roads, on faces' tan!

I'd love to be a sweep's boy, black as Town;
Yes, or a muckman.
Must I be his load?
A flea would do.

If one chap wasn't bloody,
Or went stone-cold, I'd find another body.

Which I shan't manage now. Unless it's yours.

I shall stay in you,
friend,
for some few hours.

You'll feel my heavy spirit chill your chest,
And climb your throat on sobs, until it's chased
On sighs, and wiped
from off your lips by wind.
I think on your rich breathing, brother, I'll be weaned

To do without what blood remained me from my wound.

5th December 1917.

And then:

Fools say they learn from experience; I prefer to learn from the experienceof others.”


— Otto von Bismark2

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Welcome

In this my personal Christian blog, I hope to be discursive and now and then critical. What I write here is tentative and tensive. I post thoughts, feelings, and observations somewhat randomly and often in immediate response to current events and posts on other blogs.


"Serendipitous Creativity" from Gordon Kaufman

"I suggested that what we today should regard as God is the ongoing creativity in the universe - the bringing (or coming) into being of what is genuinely new, something transformative; …

"In some respects and some degrees this creativity is apparently happening continuously, in and through the processes or activities or events around us and within us(…) is a profound mystery to us humans(…) But on the whole, as we look back on the long and often painful developments that slowly brought human life and our complex human worlds into being, we cannot but regard this creativity as serendipitous …

"I want to stress that this serendipitous creativity - God! - to which we should be responsive is not the private possession of any of the many particular religious faiths or systems …

"This profound mystery of creativity is manifest in and through the overall human bio-historical evolution and development everywhere on the planet; and it continues to show itself throughout the entire human project, no matter what may be the particular religious and or cultural beliefs."

Gordon Kaufman, Mennonite Life, December 2005 vol. 60 no. 4

Melville is a rational man who

"Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reasons we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive." (John Updike)

And that is a problem for me.

Fragmented Notions

Fragmented Notions
Copyright © 2007 Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University

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