God, I need to update this blog...
I was driving to my new job today and heard this on the radio, and cried:
A poem by Edward Ledford, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, appears toward the end of the renga. Ledford experienced the Sept. 11 attack at the Pentagon and tells Montagne what he found in the building's ruins.
"Right where the Pentagon had sheared off, on about the third floor, is a dictionary on a pedestal still open and apparently untouched," Ledford says. "And I always thought that had a lot of symbolism."
Ledford's poem reads:
Pathogens injected Trojan-horse-style; temple walls crumble
before a small
lexicon, altared and stable, unsullied, too briefly a miracle. Our
neo-tragedy was their crazy carte blanche.
You'd think they'd have read their Homer. But, like
slapping the moron beside the bully, we invade Babylon to
applause, which muted, a-hem, throats cleared for political
posterity.
Soldiers are nothing more than pharmakon charged with the
damned's duty,
enlisted to oaths that only finally matter when we wish they
didn't. The
soldier-philosopher turns the gun on himself to salvage some
meaning.
A smirk and crooked smile, Heh heh heh, sure showd em, didn
we, Dead-eye.
http://www.wbur.org/npr/135606210/crossing-state-lines-54-writers-one-american-poem
