Wolves

The new Bush-Cheney ad featuring wolves stalking through a forest has been
compared to Ronald Reagan's 'Bear' ad. Glenn
Reynolds provides a link to both of them at one place at the Daily
Recycler. But to one of Roger
Simon's readers, it evokes Louis Macneice's poem
"Wolves". The poem reminds us that there is more than one response to
a circling pack.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,

Join hands and make believe that joined

Hands will keep away the wolves of water

Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed

That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

September 11 did not evoke a universal desire to strike back which President
Bush somehow "squandered". Judyth
Hill's poem, "Make Peace", described as a thing of beauty by the
pacifist movement, took a different tack.

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,

breathe out whole buildings

and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children

and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen

and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:

hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools:

flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Make soup. Hold hands. That's all you have to do.

Best of the Comments

Find out how the word "spandrel" is used in context from reader Jinderella's

comment. But here's some background in
spandrels.

"Dr. Gould and Dr. Richard Lewontin, also at Harvard, soon elaborated on
the importance of how organisms are built, or their architecture, in a famous
paper about a feature of buildings known as a spandrel. Spandrels, the spaces
above an arch, exist as a necessary outcome of building with arches. In the
same way, they argued, some features of organisms exist simply as the result
of how an organism develops or is built. Thus researchers, they warned, should
refrain from assuming that every feature exists for some adaptive purpose."

I doubt one could have "breathed in the SS Totenkopf Corp and breathed out
Wandervoggel merrily hiking thru the alps singing songs." Nor could anyone on
the doomed aircraft of 9/11 breath in an Islamofacsist thug and breath out a
flight attendant with a warmed towel before dinner. --

Rickvid