WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
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Untold heroics by unnamed men, now buried and forgotten by all except the ghosts they share the battlefields with; friend and enemy alike now bound by the contest that killed them. None of them knew what the next instant would bring, but all of them knew the desperate struggle and the fear and the sweat and the stink and the blood in the dark sand and the flames in the caves. Thousands of men thrown up against a big rock where thousands of other men had prepared well for exactly that. The few men in the film and in the photos became known but only because of their accidental fame and to them we owe a debt: They were the cast that made the battle famous and gave at least some of the dead an animated memorial of sorts.
Heroics by men from all over the free world have kept this planet from the death of all forms of socialism but I’m pretty damned sure that the current crop of tattooed, drugged, tranny minded, LBGTQ embracing, free ranging and by-God useless and pussified, cell phone addicted men who comprise the vast majority of service aged men in this country wouldn’t get through the first week of Boot Camp at a Mediterranean spa and they certainly wouldn’t last 5 seconds with a DI crawling up their butts. They’re so pitiful that I wouldn’t even want to watch them endure Boot in any branch of the service.
Our military is filled with great men and women but the only thing that keeps the country safe is its proliferation of weapons that guarantee pure hell on earth, for everyone, in a conflict. Internally, we’re fucked.
one of those men was a navy medical corpsman/pharmacist’s mate. his son, unaware of the particulars of his father’s wartime experience, as he never talked of it, investigated it after his death, his interest driven by finding his father’s awarded navy cross among his effects.
wrote a book about it, and his father, maybe 35 years ago (?)