Thoughts From Will

Sonnet XXX.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

The canary in the coal mine

"In migratory flights most birds apparently progress at a speed of twenty to fifty miles an hour, and the long journeys made by some are accomplished by moving for long hours at a steady rate rather than by tremendous bursts of speed for short distances. Observations of birds flying by night, made at lighthouses and other favorable points, have shown that migrants pass in regular unhurried flight. If we postulate ten hours as a fair period for a nonstop migration flight over land, the speeds that have been cited would in that period carry the smaller birds from 200 to 270 miles, and ducks and geese from 420 to 590 miles. These are instances of magnitude, particularily when travel is in a direct air line, and would enable the birds to cover the ordinary migration route from Canada or the northern States to the Gulf coast region, or even to Central and South America....."*

Wonder how the birds will be able to make the non-stop flight when the "Gulf coast region" is closed due to oil?

*Smithsonian Scientific Series, Vol 9, Signed Patrons Edition, 1934. Complete 12-volume set offered for sale by Chewybooks as of June 3, 2010.

In Memory of Memorial Day

World War II

It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane

just as we were dumping bombs on the already

smoking city

on signal from the lead bomber in the squadron.

The plane jumped again and again as the shells burst

under us

sending jagged pieces of steel rattling through our

fuselage.

It was pure chance

that none of us got ripped by those fragments.


Then, being hit, we had to drop out of formation

right away

losing speed and altitude,

and when I figured out our course with trembling hands

on the instruments

(I was navigator)

we set out on the long trip home to England

alone, with two of our four engines gone

and gas streaming out of holes in the wing tanks.


That morning at briefing

we had been warned not to go to nearby Poland

partly liberated then by the Russians,

although later we learned that another crew in trouble

had landed there anyway,
and patching up their plane somehow,

returned gradually to England

roundabout by way of Turkey and North Africa.

But we chose England, and luckily

the Germans had no fighters to send up after us then

for this was just before they developed their jet.

To lighten our load we threw out

guns and ammunition, my navigation books, all the junk

and, in a long descent, made it over Holland

with a few goodbye fireworks from the shore guns.


Over the North Sea the third engine gave out

and we dropped low over the water.

The gas gauge read empty but by keeping the nose

down

a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward

and kept our single engine going.

High overhead, the squadrons were flying home in

formation

—the raids had gone on for hours after us.

Did they see us down there skimming the waves?

We radioed our final position for help to come

but had no idea if anyone

happened to be tuned in and heard us,

and we crouched together on the floor

knees drawn up and head down

in regulation position for ditching;

listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,

and we went down into the sea with a crash,

just like hitting a brick wall,

jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.

Who would ever think water could be so hard?

You black out, and then come to

with water rushing in like a sinking-ship movie.


All ten of us started getting out of there fast:

there was a convenient door in the roof to climb out by,

one at a time. We stood in line,

water up to our thighs and rising.

The plane was supposed to float for twenty seconds

but with all those flak holes

who could say how long it really would?

The two life rafts popped out of the sides into the water

but one of them only half-inflated

and the other couldn’t hold everyone

although they all piled into it, except the pilot,

who got into the limp raft that just floated.

The radio operator and I, out last,

(did that mean we were least aggressive, least likely

to survive?)

we stood on the wing watching the two rafts

being swept off by waves in different directions.

We had to swim for it.

Later they said the cords holding rafts to plane

broke by themselves, but I wouldn’t have blamed them

for cutting them loose, for fear

that by waiting for us the plane would go down

and drag them with it.


I headed for the overcrowded good raft

and after a clumsy swim in soaked heavy flying clothes

got there and hung onto the side.

The radio operator went for the half-inflated raft

where the pilot lay with water sloshing over him,

but he couldn’t swim, even with his life vest on,

being from the Great Plains—

his strong farmer’s body didn’t know

how to wallow through the water properly

and a wild current seemed to sweep him farther off.

One minute we saw him on top of a swell

and perhaps we glanced away for a minute

but when we looked again he was gone—

just as the plane went down sometime around then

when nobody was looking.


It was midwinter and the waves were mountains

and the water ice water.

You could live in it twenty-five minutes

the Ditching Survival Manual said.

Since most of the crew were squeezed on my raft

I had to stay in the water hanging on.

My raft? It was their raft, they got there first so they

would live.

Twenty-five minutes I had.

Live, live, I said to myself.

You’ve got to live.

There looked like plenty of room on the raft

from where I was and I said so

but they said no.

When I figured the twenty-five minutes were about up

and I was getting numb,

I said I couldn’t hold on anymore,

and a little rat-faced boy from Alabama, one of the

gunners,

got into the icy water in my place,

and I got on the raft in his.

He insisted on taking off his flying clothes

which was probably his downfall because even wet

clothes are protection,

and then worked hard, kicking with his legs, and we all

paddled,

to get to the other raft

and tie them together.

The gunner got in the raft with the pilot

and lay in the wet.

Shortly after, the pilot started gurgling green foam from

his mouth—

maybe he was injured in the crash against the

instruments—

and by the time we were rescued,

he and the little gunner were both dead.


That boy who took my place in the water

who died instead of me

I don’t remember his name even.

It was like those who survived the death camps

by letting others go into the ovens in their place.

It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live.

I’m a good swimmer,

but I didn’t swim off in that scary sea

looking for the radio operator when he was

washed away.

I suppose, then, once and for all,

I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,

although at that time I believed in being heroic, in

saving the world,

even if, when opportunity knocked,

I instinctively chose survival.


As evening fell the waves calmed down

and we spotted a boat, not far off, and signaled with a

flare gun,

hoping it was English not German.

The only two who cried on being found

were me and a boy from Boston, a gunner.

The rest of the crew kept straight faces.


It was a British air-sea rescue boat:

they hoisted us up on deck,

dried off the living and gave us whisky and put us

to bed,

and rolled the dead up in blankets,

and delivered us all to a hospital on shore

for treatment or disposal.

None of us even caught cold, only the dead.


This was a minor accident of war:

two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea

and we were back at Grafton-Underwood, our base,

ready for combat again,

the dead crewmen replaced by living ones,

and went on hauling bombs over the continent of

Europe,

destroying the Germans and their cities.

Edward Field

Reprinted from Poets of World War II
(The Library of America, 2003), pages 195–200.
© Copyright 1967, 1987 Edward Field.
By arrangement with University of Pittsburgh Press.
From Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963–1992 (1992).
Reprinted in After the Fall: Poems Old and New
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).

A Great Salt Marsh

“To stand at the edge of the sea,

to sense the ebb and flow of the tides,

to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh,

to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up

and down the surf lines of the continents

for untold thousands of year,

to see the running of the old eels

and the young shad to the sea,

is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly

eternal as any earthly life can be.”

Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (1955)

Grand Isle, Louisiana.

Now irreversibly drenched in oil.

What Is Left In Our Hands

"I can show you what is left. After the pride, passion, agony, and bemused aspiration, what is left in our hands. Here are the scraps of newspaper, more than a century old, splotched and yellowed and huddled together in a library, like November leaves abandoned by the wind, damp, and leached out, back of the stables or in a fence corner of a vacant lot.

Here are the diaries, the documents, and the letters, yellow too, bound in neat bundles with tape so stiffened and tired that it parts almost unresisting at your touch. Here are the records of what happened in that courtroom, all the words taken down. Here is the manuscript he himself wrote, day after day, as he waited in his cell, telling his story.

The letters of his script lean forward in their haste. Haste toward what? The bold stroke of the quill catches on the rough paper, fails, resumes, moves on in its race against time, to leave time behind, or in its rush to meet Time at last at the devoted and appointed place. To whom was he writing, rising from his mire or leaning from his flame to tell his story? The answer is easy. He was writing for us."*

Robert Penn Warren was the quintessential Southern writer, orginally from Kentucky (but his mother's people, the Penn's, were from a county just south of us. He was that elusive writer that excelled in holding up a mirror to the face of the 1940's and 1950's south, and he made sure that the reflection was accurate, whether flattering or not. Although raised a segregationist, by the 1950's he had converted (yes, at that time it was a conscious conversion and acknowledgement of societal wrongs) to a very public position as defender of the civil rights movement, writing Who Speaks for the Negro, a collection of interviews with black civil rights leaders including Malcolm X and Martin Luther King in 1965, setting himself apart from his contemporaries.

World Enough and Time is an exercise that toys with history, memory and the truth, and how they blend in the mind.

"We have what is left, the lies and half-lies and the truths and the half-truths. We do not know that we have the Truth."*

*From World Enough and Time, Robert Penn Warren, 1950

It Didn't Look Like A Yankee Person Could Be So Mean

"Ex-slave Nancy Johnson's testimony was recorded after the War as she and her husband tried to recover $514.50 from the victorious Union, in compensation for their horses, hogs and provisions:

"the Yankees had ripped up the beds, scattered the feathers and carried off the ticking, blankets, and coverings of every description and had burned her clothing and her children's clothing. And the Union men killed their cattle. All their provisions had been taken from them, so they were compelled to find another country. Whenever the Yankee officers were remonstrated with for burning and destroying property which was valuable only to the owners, their universal reply was: 'I'm sorry for you, but must obey orders'."

"Nancy Johnson's testimony informs us that the soldiers treated master and slave alike. During the 1930's ex-slave Sam Word recalled that a Yankee stole a quilt from his mother. She retaliated, "Why you nasty stinking rascal. You say you come down here to fight for the negroes, and now you're stelaing from them." The soldier replied, "You're a goddamned liar. I'm fighting for $14 a month and the Union."

And that was the treatment of the slaves that encountered the Union Army.

As for the white folks?

"The armies took anything that could be eaten, drunk, worn, or slept under. Soldiers stripped beds, from the big house to the slave cabins. Women often directed their servants to bury their quilts with the silver. the sentimental value of the quilts was probably as important as their functional value."

From Quilts From the Civil War: Nine Projects, Historic Notes, Diary Entries by Barbara Brackman, offered for sale by Chewybooks on Amazon as of May 9, 2010.

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.

Mark Twain's letter to W.D. Howells, 2 April 1899

In Memory of Lucky

November 11,1998- May 5, 2010