Poetry Is A Fireplace In Summer Or

The Earth Forgives The Previous Year Every Year.

Like Everyone Else, I Was At Least Peripherally Involved In The Antiwar Movement. You Woke Up Every Morning Feeling Tormented About What Was Going On In Vietnam. It Seemed To A Lot Of Us Like A Catastrophe From The Very Beginning, Inflicting Immense And Needless Suffering On Not Only The American Soldiers But On A Lot Of Innocent Peasants Who Were Caught In A Cold War Proxy Battle - Two Million Vietnamese Died During Those Years, And You Woke Up Every Morning Knowing That That Was Going On.

Sometimes From This Hillside Just After Sunset The Rim Of The Sky Takes On A Tinge Of The Palest Green, Like The Flesh Of A Cucumber When You Peel It Carefully.

It Turns Out - This Is A Metaphor Out Of [charles] Dickens - That The Raw Sewage Emptied Into The Anacostia Comes From The Federal Triangle. I Have A Sewer Map, And On It You Can See The Pipe From Which Congressional Wastes Empty Into The River That Then Flows Through The Black Neighborhoods Of Washington, D.c. It Is Very Expensive To Do Anything About The River, But Somebody's Working On It.

Someone Will Always Want To Mobilize Death On A Massive Scale For Economic Domination Or Revenge. And The Task, Taken As A Task, Appeals To The Imagination. The Military Is An Engineering Profession.