Poem: A Burnt Offering

I can't ever look back.


I can't ever rip time off the wall, and wind the reel back to the start.

Like that picture in my mind of you leaving, the back of your perfect head

framed in the doorway. I can never rip that off of the wall, and go back.

I can't go back because if I start there, then I will keep going. First,

I'll save our marriage, then I will go a little farther and save the lives

the people I loved and didn't love that I watched die last year. Next,

it will occur to me that I should go farther back and save the Jews.

If you could shoot Hitler in 1933, before the madness, wouldn't you?

I will. I will shoot him. Then I will cry in a graveyard in Berlin,

and go farther back. So many to save--I will burn the smallpox blankets,

free the slaves, warn the Incas, bring down Torquemada, destroy the Huns,

bring down the coliseums, and keep going back and back. I will

come to Christ's cross with a machine gun and an axe, and I will cut him

down. I will never let men sacrifice men, never in the name of God

and never in the name of power. I will never let six million Jews burn up

in smoke. I will change history. I will save innocence.


But I cannot go back. I shake my fists, I jump up and down, I cry. I

am stuck here in the present, and the past is a weight I can barely carry.

I can't ever look back.

The defense of innocence

I have been away from this blog, immersed in school work, for a few weeks now. I am going to the Holocaust Museum for a field trip soon, and I watched the most incredible video on Africa this evening. It's amazing, when you finally look up from work and your own life, what wonders and terrors the world can hold. I started into this teaching thing thinking that it would give me time to write in the summers. I now see that's like saying I got into hunting tigers because I thought it would give me time to watch stripes. The visceral experience of teaching is life-altering.

So...much...going...on. I will tell you about it when life slows down. In the meantime, check out the following. Sudan is still practicing genocide, and it ain't pretty. There comes a time in history when we must defend innocence, or throw it in the gutter. When 11 million souls went into the dark oblivion through the passivity and inaction of a disinterested world, did we learn anything? I doubt it, but we will see. Darfur must be defended.

A True Fable on Progress

It was election time in New Hampshire, and an early couple of feet of wet snow had fallen. As I exited off I-91 to return to the Granite State, I noticed a pretty young lady trying to dig her compact car out of the small triangle of snow between the traffic light and the exit ramp. I went over to help her dig; her car was stuck up to the axles, but it moved a bit if you pushed it. She being quite stuck and I-91 well-traveled, a crowd of New Hampshirites and Vermonters quickly assembled to help push her out of the snow. Some thought we should push her back to the road, some thought we should push her forward to the road. Each side took their preferred side of the car, and new arrivals were strongly recruited to join a particular side. After each side had its push, she would try to drive out and spin her tires. After some minutes of pushing back and forth and polishing the snow under her tires to ice, a guy on the other side of the car looked at me and said, “Isn’t this like politics? You push one way, we push the other, and this car isn’t going anywhere!”

The tow-truck came and got her a half-hour later, and then I went off to vote.