Saw this poem on the Garrison Keillor website and need to share it.
The Weight
by Linda Gregg
Two horses were put together in the same paddock.
Night and day. In the night and in the day
wet from heat and the chill of the wind
on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging
and the taste of bay in the shadowed air.
The dignity of being. They slept that way,
knowing each other always.
Withers quivering for a moment,
fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail,
width of back. The volume of them, and each other's weight.
Fences were nothing compared to that.
People were nothing. They slept standing,
their throats curved against the other's rump.
They breathed against each other,
whinnied and stomped.
There are things they did that I do not know.
The privacy of them had a river in it.
Had our universe in it. And the way
its border looks back at us with its light.
This was finally their freedom.
The freedom an oak tree knows.
That is built at night by stars.
"The Weight" by Linda Gregg, from Chosen by the Lion. © Graywolf Press, 1994.
I am currently reading The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund, a history of WWI told through dairies of people who lived at that time and participated in the horrow of that war. It is hard to read as the stories are so powerful and the tales they are telling so terrible. Single battles occurred often where 100,000(+) people died in the course of a few days. Horses were used in that war, as well as WWII and sufferred terribly.
Pete Seeger found inspiration for the folk song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone, in 1955, while on a plane bound for a concert he was giving that year. Leafing through his notebooks he saw the passage, "Where are the flowers, the girls have plucked them. Where are the girls, they've all taken husbands. Where are the men, they're all in the army."
The lines were taken from the traditional Cossacks folk song "Tovchu, tovchu mak", referenced in the Mikhail Sholokhov novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), which Seeger had read "at least a year or two before". The Russian novel in two parts was published between 1928 and 1940. The Don Flows Home to the Sea, part two of the original novel, was published in English translation in 1940. Set in the Don River basin of southwestern Russia at the end of the czarist period, the novel traces the progress of a Cossack soldier from a young boy to a Red Army regular and finally to a Cossack nationalist. War -- in the form of both international conflict and civil revolution -- provides the epic backdrop for the narrative.
In WWI, Russian troops were among the most feared and hated of all the soldiers in the conflict because of the their tactics of total destruction on the lands they traveled through. "Scorched earth" hardly describes what they did.
When will we ever learn?
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