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On the Third Anniversary of the Ongoing War in Iraq Sam Hamill august 2006 a letter to Hayden Carruth It’s been nearly forty years since you wrote that poem about writing poems against all those wars, Harlan County to Italy and Spain. When your Selected Poems arrived today, it was one of the poems that gave me pause reading it again. We’ve been at war ever since. I too, born in World War, have lived and written against that particular stupidity and pointless, hopeless pain all my agonizing days. Has even a single life thereby been saved? Who can say? Except that doing so saved mine. Oh, I could tell you about saved lives. There was that beautiful young woman in Sitka whose husband, jealous of her poetry, tied her feet together with a rope and threw her from his boat. You have about 12 minutes of life in those southeast Alaskan waters. Or the grandmother in Utah who wrote rhymed, romantic sonnets and called me late one night in my motel because her jaw was broken, and her nose, and because Hamill / On the Third Anniversary of the Ongoing War in Iraq 241 he was still drinking. Or I could tell you about Alex, doing life for murder over drugs, and how his eyes lit up when he discovered the classics. Yes, poetry saves lives. All wars begin at home within the warring self. No, our poems cannot stop a war, not this nor any war, but the one that rages from within. Which is the Wrst and only step. It is a sacred trust, a duty, the poet’s avocation. We write the poetry we must. The House Murdered Mahmoud Darwish november 2006 In one minute, the whole life of a house ends. The house murdered is also mass murder, even if vacant of its residents. It is a mass grave for the basic elements needed to construct a building for meaning, or for an insigniWcant poem in a time of war. The house, murdered, is the amputation of things from their relations and from the names of emotions, and it is tragedy’s need to guide eloquence to contemplate the life of a thing. In each thing there’s a being that aches . . . the memory of Wngers, of a scent, of an image. And houses get murdered just as their residents get murdered. And as the memory of things get murdered—wood, stone, glass, iron, cement—they all scatter in fragments like beings. And cotton, silk, linen, notepads, books, all are torn like words whose owners were not given time to speak. And the plates, spoons, toys, records, faucets, pipes, door handles, and the fridge, the washer, the vases, jars of olives and pickles, and canned foods, all break as their owners broke. And the two whites, salt and sugar, are pulverized, and also the spices, the matchboxes, the pills and oral contraceptives, elixirs, garlic braids, onions, tomatoes, dried okra, rice and lentils, as happens with the residents. And the lease contract, the marriage and birth certiWcates, the utility bills, identity cards, passports, love letters, all torn to shreds like the hearts of their owners. And the 242 part 11 parading poetry ...

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