@edgarblythe,
Hurry back, edgar.
Since tomorrow is Memorial Day, I was thinking about Omaha Beach.
Let's not forget, but let's remember that there were good and bad on all sides of war.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPNuPNW3MOA&feature=related
So long ago, some person dropped by our radio asking about the poem Lunch on Omaha Beach.
Here it is, and it says volumes
Bink Noll
Lunch on Omaha Beach
The killers are killed, their violent rinds
conveyed, and the beach is back to summer.
I eat sausage with bread. Full of ease, the sea
Makes the sound of cows chewing through high grass.
They're deposited in government lawn
Set with nine thousand decencies of stone
To wet the eye, shake the heart, and lose
Each name in a catalog of graven names.
They are wasted in the blank of herohood.
They are dead to fondness and paradox.
They're all the same. In the field of lawn
Above the beach, they're put away the same.
They should be left exactly here below where
Death's great bronze mares shook earth and bloodied them,
Where violence of noise isolated each boy
In the body of his scream, and dropped him.
No worn Norman hill should be scarred and smoothed
To suit officials' tidy thoughts for graveyards
But the wreckage left, shrinking in rust and rags
And carrion to dust or tumuli.
To honor my thoughts against shrines, to find
The beast who naked wakes in us and walks
In flags, to watch the color of his day
I spill my last Bordeaux into the sand.
Watching, I wonder at the white quiet,
The fields of butter cows, my countrymen
Come to study battle maps, blue peasants
Still moving back and forth, the day's soft sea.
.
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