Sunday, May 10, 2009
The Poetry of Veterans
MONUMENTS
We are not statues
Standing among the trees,
A tribute to what has passed.
We are not statues,
Though our faces are stone,
Chiseled by time, shaped by history
That we are now part of,
As it is part of us.
We are living monuments,
Stoic in the shadows
As the world around us moves.
Colin Halloran, 23, senior
Central Connecticut State University
More here.
We are not statues
Standing among the trees,
A tribute to what has passed.
We are not statues,
Though our faces are stone,
Chiseled by time, shaped by history
That we are now part of,
As it is part of us.
We are living monuments,
Stoic in the shadows
As the world around us moves.
Colin Halloran, 23, senior
Central Connecticut State University
More here.
Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq, New York Times, Poetry, soldiers' issues, the Arts, veterans
Thursday, December 27, 2007
A Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide 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?
--William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide 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?
--William Butler Yeats
Labels: Poetry
