Backstory: The trooper stopped the drunk (20 times over the limit) from driving at full speed into this:
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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oh dear
God Bless You, Trooper!
I looked it up and apparently the drunk driver survived and faces charges.
The officer did the equivalent of throwing yourself on a hand grenade. Pretty frightening stuff. Give her a medal, a promotion, and a desk. My hat’s off to her.
Right on Casey, her actions saved many Innocent lives.
It kind of irritates me that these special events can shut down highways. Bicycles, runners, parades, etc. Surely there are some non-highway venues where they can do their thing. But if they must use the highways why shouldn’t they pay the taxes. One day closing the bridge = $100,000. Seems fair.
Another example of why I proudly fly a Thin Blue Line American flag at my home and one at my business.
We need a lot more Police Officers like her.
“We need a lot more Police Officers like her.”
Yes indeed. Less or no pulling people over for seatbelt and other revenue collection.
Anonymous- so do you think that some folks should be exempt from the laws that everyone else should have to follow? Should fines (revenue) be eliminated and incarceration be used instead?
It does not take a genius mentality to figure out how to use a seatbelt.
That is a true Momma Bear…
We all complain that modern vehicles can’t be repaired without computers and special tools. All true. But the ability of modern–post 2000, maybe earlier–vehicles to keep occupants alive in what used to be deadly crashes is just awesome.
I covered many crashes as a reporter and as an EMT in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. As the driver in the heavier vehicle, the officer might have survived back then IF she was wearing her seatbelt. No way would the other driver live. And, back then, there would have been a lot of bent metal and perhaps a bumper on the ground. Nowadays there’s a big halo of broken parts expanding away from the impact. All of that soaked up some of the energy and kept it out of the passenger compartment.
Now a days it is $100k of spent stolen money just because.
Remember.
What if? makes the world go round, for the fraidy katz.
In a sane world that bitch would have had her fat skall crushed decades ago.
Today, soibois cuck for her.
This trooper put her life on the line, for the good of the people. She saved many many lives that day,, she did her job! That’s police” Medal of Honor” kinda courage.