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  • Where We Were and What We Were DoingAugust 19, 2003
  • Hilde Weisert (bio)

In traffic, changing stations, sick of the news where a woman with a rich European contralto commemorates her friends, their great hearts and their souls at this moment departing.

We had our own years of where-we-were and what-we-were-doing, do we need these? What are we supposed to do, having marched, and cooked the great casseroles from the Women’s Strike for Peace Cookbook,

and hosted the night meetings in our living rooms? (Remember the talk, the certainty of where we were going?) Quaint, that Apocalypse, its one-by-one bullets, its rapturous End.

*

Late—but no end. The act of remembering is again our stand, again our pledge . . . But is it what the souls at that moment would ask for, would want? Would it comfort the passengers to know we would stop in our fields

And turn our eyes upward, and speak? [End Page 13]

Hilde Weisert

Hilde Weisert’s “Finding Wilfred Owen Again” won the CALYX journal’s 2008 Lois Cranston Memorial Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ms., Cortland Review, Sun, Southern Poetry Review, Charlotte Poetry Review, Ironwood, and Litchfield Review. She has held a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts, is a Geraldine Dodge Poet, and is a 2009 resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She’s also cofounder of the Society for Veterinary Medicine and Literature.

“Being a Baby Boomer writer: The 20th century as my native country, which makes me something of an expatriate here in the 21st (but working on citizenship). And then there’s that eternal, infernal ‘baby’ in our name, seeming to describe not the boom but us ourselves—that illusion dies hard!”

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