End of Iraq war is ‘end of American empire,’ says Guardian

One Comment

1. RedRover says:

   December 19, 2011 at 2:30 pm

   My favorite poem about a war ending:

   The End and the Beginning

   After every war
   someone has to tidy up.
   Things won’t pick
   themselves up, after all.

   Someone has to shove
   the rubble to the roadsides
   so the carts loaded with corpses
   can get by.

   Someone has to trudge
   through sludge and ashes,
   through the sofa springs,
   the shards of glass,
   the bloody rags.

   Someone has to lug the post
   to prop the wall,
   someone has to glaze the window,
   set the door in its frame.

   No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
   and it takes years.
   All the cameras have gone
   to other wars.

   The bridges need to be rebuilt,
   the railroad stations, too.
   Shirtsleeves will be rolled
   to shreds.

   Someone, broom in hand,
   still remembers how it was.
   Someone else listens, nodding
   his unshattered head.

   But others are bound to be bustling nearby
   who’ll find all that
   a little boring.

   From time to time someone still must
   dig up a rusted argument
   from underneath a bush
   and haul it off to the dump.

   Those who knew
   what this was all about
   must make way for those
   who know little.
   And less than that.
   And at last nothing less than nothing.

   Someone has to lie there
   in the grass that covers up
   the causes and effects
   with a cornstalk in his teeth,
   gawking at clouds.

   “The End and the Beginning” by Wislawa Szymborska from Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh (Harvest Books)