the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

[ariadnes_string]

was yesterday...

But we are observing Veteran's Day today here in the US.

Like last year, here's picture of new memorial to Wilfrid Owens: the old farm house where he spent the night before he died in the battle of the Sambre-Oise Canal, Nov.4, 1918, one of the last actions of the war, has been transformed into a memorial to his poetry:



article here

And two 2012 poems by Kevin Powers:

"Death, Mother and Child" and "After Leaving Maguire Veteran's Hospital for the Last Time"

Comments

[garryowen]

Those poems make me look forward to his book. It's not the pretty language but rather the way he moves from topic to topic in such a fresh way.

btw, I read Every Day by David Levithan today, and it was great!

[ariadnes_string]

Me too! I like the parts of the second poem that are clipped and ironic more than pretty parts, I think, like:

you realize your life is just a catalogue
of methods, every word of it an effort
to stay sane. Count to ten whenever
you begin to shake. If pain of any kind
is felt, take whatever is around
into your hands and squeeze, push
your feet as far as they will go
into the earth. Burial is likely what
you’re after anyway.

I feel like sometimes he relies on the pretty, because he does it so well (the Yellow Birds is like that too). But I'm glad to see more poems appearing!

Oh! I've been thinking of reading that, glad to hear it's good. It's kind of empathy as narrative practice, yeah? "standing in someone else's shoes."

(sending you a new version of the ending of that fic in 3,2, 1...)

[garryowen]

The one thing I really didn't like about Every Day: lay instead of lie. WTF, Random House editors??????

[ariadnes_string]

omg, that happens in The Hunger Games, too! I feel like it's becoming part of acceptable language, like "impacting." It makes my skin crawl, though, as with THG, it won't stop me from reading the book.