!["Let My Cry Come Unto Thee:" An Ash Wednesday Confession [2006-2022]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ash-wednesday-150x150.jpg "\"Let My Cry Come Unto Thee:\" An Ash Wednesday Confession [2006-2022]")
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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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Some of these death tolls are off. Vietnam is WAY off. So wo further ado ..
Revolution .. KIA .. 5000 …… Total deaths including exposure (Valley Forge) disease, POW mistreatment — 25,000
Civil War … long established figure … 600k
Union — 360 total; 140,000 KIA
Confederacy — 200K dead, no division between KIA and other deaths. Tens of thousands of civilian deaths in immediate aftermath of war
WWI — 116K total deaths, of which 46K were caused by influenza pandemic … 56,000 KIA (30K flu deaths occured in stateside training camps in a period of 4 weeks … incredible!)
WWII — Used to be 408k; but recently revised to account for 9500 Merchant Marines killed by U-Boats in Battle of Atlantic …. Some 310,000 KIA to inclube the Merchant Marines
Korea — 37K total deaths … 33K is total for KIA
Vietnam — 58K total deaths, of which 47000 were KIA …… 282K figure WAY off
Very inspiring. Thank you.
Multiculturalism. Under Ba’al.
A couple other corrections/additions: 1) Why leave out the War of 1812? True, the KIA toll was relatively light (2200 to 3500; deaths from all causes 15,000), but the war proved that our country was a going concern, and it gave us our national anthem (there’s a reason why Francis Scott Key’s statue in San Francisco was targeted last week).
2) WWI: We didn’t enter the war officially until April 1917, so the video’s reference to the outbreak of the war in July 1914 is (unintentionally) misleading. If we had joined the Allies in 1914, the KIA toll would have been much higher.
The hippies are entirely within their rights to burn the flag at Gettysburg on the 4th of July. That being said, if they try that shit next to me, I will whip their asses.
GOD BLESS AMERICA!
Why? Why should God? As Americans and the Church allows itself to be put into bondage to the demonic?
BTW you Traditional Americans, speaking of their “rights’ and their “free speech”, how’s the rights and free speech of yours working out? Have you noticed that the rights and free speech that you proclaim to so cherish for everyone, is not only being spoken, but ACTED OUT ON, while you are not only being thrown into the curb and stomped on physically, but so is your Traditional American muh rights and free speech? Why, it’s as if you believe their rights, and their free speech, which they act on, is more valuable than your muh rights and free speech, which you dare not act on. Well, just keep flapping your lips.
The United States, indeed all of Creation, is under God; but anyone who today mistakes that the United States is one nation is deluding himself.
Casey sed: “…burn the flag at Gettysburg on the 4th of July… I will whip their asses.”
=======
ghost sed: “Get out of the way and take notes. Gettysburg is my birthplace and the 4th of July was when my only son was born, and I almost died twice for that flag. “Whipped Ass” will have a whole new meaning when I climb up off their smoking asses and I don’t care how many of them there is.”
Easy Elder,
Most of us are not triggered that easily. Most of us either have jobs that prevent us from acting like asses all night long, or we are not foolish enough to put ourselves in harms way unnecessarily. If and when the threshold is finally met then an appropriate response will be dished out.
This vid was a nice effort, but the youngster who made it did slip some Soviets in there, and that ruins it for me. To most people, all uniforms look alike. It’s a shame.
No matter what anyone else says, it’s been an amazing 528 years.
Just look at what has been done.
It hasn’t been all peaches and cream, nothing ever is.
But the flowers far out numbered the weeds and this isn’t arguable.