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The time of manifest destiny is over, the time of grief has come.

The last line of a 3-page poem titled Anger Against Children

Such unsparing words, and yet we let them pass as if nothing were expected of us.

When William Stafford Died.

A poem to be read in its entirety.

From Waiting For The Stars

One star stands alone in the western darkness;
Arcturus. Caught in their love, the Arabs called it
The Keeper of Heaven. I think
It was in the womb that I received
The thirst for the dark heavens.

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six feet from the house.
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more books;
The son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a party, and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls leaving the church.
It will not come closer.

Night of first snow.
I stand, my back against a board fence.
The fir trees are black at the trunk, white out on the edges.
The earth balances all around my feet.

I've stood in moments such as these in my life and this sends me spiralling back to all those moments. What magic there is in that first snow, in a dark country night. The world a blanket of white, and you, the centre of the universe.

I am "reading” Trollope’s Barsetshire books lately mostly as a kind of bedtime lullaby. The audiobks murmur while Barchester’s assorted schemers carry on with great seriousness about things that are faintly ridiculous.

Trollope has that rare gift of seeing through everyone’s vanity while still liking them very much and so, somewhere between their thunderings and maneuverings, I drift off, knowing humanity is safe.

I will be very happy to move away from his more political poetry. I like the earlier Bly, the farmer in Minnesota, and the later Bly: (i.e, Bly the visionary, and Bly the quiet contemplative.) I'm getting my own form of PTSD wading through his more ideologically charged poetry. Not that I don't admire it, but it's just not the right time for me. (And yet it seems a sin to jump over them.)

He declares the Peasants' War was fomented by Italians from the North
And the attorney general lies about the time the sun sets.


Once again, history walks in rhyme. Not hard to believe this was 1973. ... which just as easily have rhymed in 2026?

He has private information about which city is the capital of Wyoming,
He lies next about the birthplace of Attila the Hun
Then about the composition of amniotic fluid.

He insists that Luther was never a German
And only the Protestants sold indulgences.
He declares that Pope Leo X wanted to reform the Church, but the liberal elements prevented him.

Now the Chief Executive enters, and the press conference begins.
First the President lies about the date the Appalachian Mountains rose.
Then he lies about the population of Chicago,
Then the weight of the adult eagle, and the acreage of the Everglades,
Next he lies about the number of fish taken every year in the Arctic

The bombers spread out, temperature steady
A Negro's ear sleeping in an automobile tire
Pieces of timber float by saying nothing

Bishops rush about crying, There is no war
And bombs fall
Leaving a dust on the beach trees

One leg walks down the road and leaves
The other behind, the eyes part
And fly off in opposite directions

Filaments of death grow out.
The sheriff cuts off his black legs
And nails them to a tree.

In the poem, Those Being Eaten By America ....

The cry of those being eaten by America,
Others pale and soft being stored for later eating

...

That is why these poems are so sad
The long-dead running over the fields,

The mass sinking down
The light in children's faces fading at six or seven

The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved.

Written 1967-ish. Really? And not 2026?

Now I want to go back among the dark roots;
Now I want to see the day pulling its long wing;

Can it be Four Moons have passed between us, My Sister? I wear in my hair the white cord of mourning for her, my Ancient One. Although I go about my life, I am not the same. The gods have cut me off from my source, from the flesh that formed my flesh, and the bone of which my bones are made. Forever I bleed at the point of separation.

"With those two under one roof, the old and the young, it is iron meeting flint. Who can tell which will crush the other?"

"And what will come of it?"

"Fire of some sort ... I pity your brother. There is no man able to stand unmoved between two proud women, one of them old and one of them young, and both loving him supremely."

"But I thought they came over here to our country to learn civilization. My mother said so."

"She was mistaken. In fact, I believe they come over here thinking to teach us civilization. They have a great deal to learn from us, it is true, but they don't know it any more than you realize what we have to learn from them."

They had escaped the dungeons of the king and were through the wood, but whether alive or dead still remains to be seen.

"Must we go any further?" asked Bilbo, when it was so dark that he could only just see Thorin's beard wagging beside him, and so quiet that he could hear the dwarves' breathing like a loud noise. "My toes are all bruised and bent, and my legs ache, and my stomach is wagging like an empty sack."

Gandalf thought of most things; and though he could not do everything, he could do a great deal for friends in a tight corner.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.

So far as she could see neither the church nor the home was regarded as anything other than a momentary utility to be cast aside without regret. She was not so ignorant a woman as to suppose this state of affairs necessarily presaged moral ruin, but something warned her that readjustments more painful than any she had known yawned before these madcap adventurers in self-expression, independence and so-called freedom.

So far as she could see neither the church nor the home was regarded as anything other than a momentary utility to be cast aside without regret. She was not so ignorant a woman as to suppose this state of affairs necessarily presaged moral ruin, but something warned her that readjustments more painful than any she had known yawned before these madcap adventurers in self-espression, independence and so-called freedom.

I'm 33 % in, and this book is teetering on the DNF precipice.

It was all Tillie's fault for bringing her city cousin -- a wispy little creature -- one of those smooth-limbed, wide-eyed feminine non-entities whose pretty legs and daring throatline justified the marked absence of more than rudimentary brains.

What but tragedy could flourish here? What a fool he was! What fools they all were to have thought otherwise. He seemed to see Isabella alone against the world doomed to perpetual exile in this jealous unrelenting wilderness, without so much as a single comforting illusion to justify the sacrifice.

The people have loved miracles for many hundred years , not as proof or evidence, but because they are the actual flowering of desire. In them the vague worship and devotion of the simple-hearted assumes a form.

Don’t teach your kids Plautdietsch if you want them to survive. When my mother went to university to become a therapist she learned that suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia.

Plautdietsch was the language of shame. Mennonites had learned to remain silent, to shoulder their pain. My grandfather’s parents were murdered in a field beside their barn but their son, my father’s father, survived by burying himself in a pile of manure. ...