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milk and honey

In the garden

Planted about 70 nasturtium seeds around the backyard. I’m very late getting them into dirt, but it’s a small investment for a possibly great payoff. (If they bloom, photos to follow in the next couple of months.)

Last Chance at Reconciliation | Joshua Mehigan

He’s certain where he’s headed it’s too late.
West Broadway glitters in a mist of rain
that amber cones of light elucidate.
He’s certain. Where he’s headed, it’s too late
to stop for flowers, dry off, or get things straight:
a story, his misshapen hat, his brain.
He’s certain where he’s headed. It’s too late.
West Broadway glitters in a mist of rain.

N.B. An example of a “triolet,” a form that’s not much in vogue these days (if ever). But I think this is an excellent, sad poem. I especially appreciate how the repeated first line changes meaning simply through varying punctuation.

Lessons Not Learned, Part 2

Robert Pape, University of Chicago:

Iran is not a palace dictatorship resting on a handful of men. It is a state of roughly 92 million people, with governing institutions embedded across society…. Roughly one in eight Iranians works for the state or in state-linked institutions. The regime’s authority is threaded through provincial administrations, economic networks, and local security structures. Removing several dozen senior leaders — even highly placed ones — touches only a small fraction of that governing apparatus. It does not dismantle the structure; it activates it.

Lessons Not Learned

There are moral and legal cases against Trump’s Iran attacks. But a purely practical one is that heavy bombing doesn’t drive the other side to surrender, as history has shown again and again: The Blitz, “bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age,” Shock and Awe in Iraq …

Ash Wednesday Poem

Sabbaths 1979 | Wendell Berry

V

How many have relinquished
Breath, in grief or rage,
The victor and the vanquished
Named on the bitter page

Alike, or indifferently
Forgot–all that they did
Undone entirely.
The dust they stirred has hid

Their faces and their works,
Has settled, and lies still.
Nobody rests or shirks
Who must turn in time’s mill.

They wind the turns of the mill
In house and field and town;
As grist is ground to meal
The grinders are ground down.