Global Warming - Raise Your Voice/Where Poetry Counted/Nuthatch

(Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova - see (P2) Philosophical- "Where Poetry Counted"- below)






(P1) Political

Global Warming is Not a Joke

Sometimes I feel like Michael Corleone, "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in. Just when, on "60 Minutes," we've received irrefutable brave evidence from the government's top climate scientist (who yanked off his muzzle to courageously and calmly vent his conscience) that we've got, maybe, 10 years, not to reverse things, but hold them where they are, out come the right wing pundits led by George Will with their paragraphs of question marks and straw man "controversies." There is no controversy. Face it, the only reason Bush doesn't sign the Kyoto Accords on Global Warming is to pander to the greedy corporate bottom line. This all-too-obviously short sighted approach contains what can only be termed an environmental death wish.

Mr. Bush, if Global Warming is not a catastrophic threat to the planet and our way of life, why then does your own Environmental Protection Agency instruct the Insurance Industry in the best ways to protect their pocket books against the effects of -yes- "Global Warming"? It's easy for any reader to follow the money to the truth.

Here's the E.P.A.'s Advice to Insurance Companies on Global Warming. Hit the link and go down about 22 lines or so to the words "Global Warming."

For a really good site about Climate Science, go to RealClimate.org.

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(P2) Philosophical

Where Expression Trumped Death and Torture

That wonderful Russian poet Osip Mandelstam once told his wife, What are you complaining about, only in our country is poetry truly respected: people are even killed because of it. That happens nowhere else.

Mandelstam was imprisoned for a poem he'd written about Stalin, but the following "perfect" poem is one of Mandelstam's last. He wrote it shortly before his death in prison in 1937.

If our antagonists take me
And people stop talking with me;
If they confiscate the whole world-
The right to breathe & open doors
And affirm that existence will exist
And that the people, like a judge, will judge;
If they dare to keep me like an animal
And fling my food on the floor-
I won't fall silent or deaden the agony,
But will write what I am free to write,
And yoking ten oxen to my voice
Will move my hand in the darkness like a plough
And fall with the full heaviness of the harvest...

Imprisoned under similar circumstances, Anna Akhmatova relates a sadly touching and uplifting story from 1957:

Instead of a Preface

In the terrible years of Yezhovism I spent seventeen months standing in line in front of the Leningrad prisons. One day someone thought he recognized me. Then, a woman with bluish lips who was behind me and to whom my name meant nothing, came out of the torpor to which we were all accustomed and said, softly (for we spoke only in whispers),

"--And that, could you describe that?"
And I said, "Yes, I can."
And then a sort of smile slid across what had been her face.


Please Post Your Comments Here about the above or any below and/or Read the Comments of Others.You can sign in as "blogger" or "other" but please add your name or initials to your text. Or email me at edcoletti@sbcglobal.net. We need your feedback.

(P3) Poetical

Nuthatch

I've yet to see
a nuthatch
hatch a nut
but
a nuthatch
hatching
nuts would
surely also be
a nut.


- Edward Coletti -In Light Year '87, (Bits Press, Robert Wallace, Ed.)