Death is so near

and simple. What makes our lives

surge forth so strongly?

From the diary of Vietnam War surgeon Đặng Thùy Trâm, 24 January 1970.

Liberation

When fear crawls out in the evenings
from all four corners,
when the winter storm raging outside
tells you it is winter,
when my soul trembles at the sight
of distant fantasies,

I shiver and say one word with every heartbeat,
every pulse, every piece of my soul.

Time, go ahead.
Time, which carries liberation
and its unknown tomorrow.

The result is certain.
Everything comes to an end.
Spring will come.

From the diary of Elsa Binder, 30 January 1942.

At night

Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself
all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.

At night the barracks sometimes lay in the moonlight
made out of silver and eternity: like a plaything
slipped from God’s preoccupied hand.

From Etty Hillesum’s diary, 23 September 1942.

the long night

it was raining a little bit all day
kinder drizzly and very damp
airplanes were buzzing overhead
most all the time jes like a lot of hornets
we seed quite a lot of our machinegun
battalion across the road from us
blowed up by the big shells

the woods were all mussed up
and looked as if a terrible cyclone
done swept through them
and all through the long night
those big guns flashed and growled
jes like the lightning and thunder
when it storms in the mountains at home

and oh, my! we had to pass the wounded
and some of them were on stretchers going
back to the dressing stations and some
were lying around moaning and twitching
and oh, my! the dead were all along the road
and their mouths were open and their eyes too
but they couldn’t see nothing no more nohow

i’m atelling you the little log cabin in wolf valley
in old tennessee seemed a long long way off

From Sergeant Alvin C. York’s diary, 7 October 1918.

The Clair de Crépuscule

But to-night I’ve been polite to a friend—
have guzzled vin ordinaire
+ puffed a Villar y Villar
and opened my dusty tobacco-jar—

and my nerves, as a consequence,
are a bit uneasy;
the thought of that soft star
comes on me most benignly.

To-morrow, however, I shall reassume
the scrutiny of things as they are.

(From Wallace Steven’s journal, October 1903)

War and Peace

A huge vista of life and suffering humankind
which makes the present troubles easier to endure,
and the loneliness of death a little thing.
Siegfried Sassoon

Clouds came down and blotted the landscape
and we squatted in a vineyard and smoked
our pipes by the blaze of dry olive-branches.

In the cloudy weather after rain
the clearness of the hills and glens
shifted from shadow to gleams of watery light

and the skylines were clean-cut
and delicate-edged. The hills looked green—
there was a look of Ireland about it.

And when we got home to camp
I found a letter from Dorothea,
the good soul, full of Limerick hunting,

and hounds flying over the big green banks.
Our padré rather drunk to-night
after all the communion wine he’d blessed

and been obliged to ‘finish up’.
And the news from remote France
grows more ominous every day.

(From Siegfried Sassoon’s diary, 1918)

She was the house

She is
with us,
she is
of us—
the eternal
stillness
is
but a form
of her love.

(Henry James writing about his mother, 1882)

Initial observations of Normandy

Nearly two out of every three
American soldiers is a Negro.
They seem to be everywhere.

In the small town of Isigny
I saw a funeral parlor
displaying a coffin with a baby.

I caught a glimpse of a 12-year old boy
in a barber shop shaving
a man five times his age.

Castles of old Norman lords.

(Roi Ottley’s diary, 1944)

Three good pictures

My life is a short, intense celebration.
With almost every breath I take, I get

a new sense and understanding
of the linden tree, of ripened wheat,

of hay, and of mignonette.
I suck everything up into me.

When it’s warm and I’m tired, I sit down
and weave a yellow garland, a blue one,

and one of thyme. A reaper in a blue smock.
He mows down all the little flowers

in front of my door. I know now of two
other pictures with death in them.

(From Paula Modersohn-Becker’s diary, 1900

The last supper

Looking back,
I think the regret about the fruit salad
was stronger than fear of all being over.
Nella Last

All the day, the tinkle of glass
being swept up and dumped in ash-bins
like wind-bells in a temple,
together with the knock-knock
as anything handy was tacked
in place over gaping windows.

I look at a tin of fruit longingly,
now that fruit is so scarce.
Little sparrows had died as they crouched.
It looked as if they had bent
their little heads in prayer.
Not one falleth that He does not see.

Poles, Czechs, Greeks, all sparrows.
I’ve opened the tin of fruit salad,
and put my best embroidered cloth on,
and made an egg-whip instead of cream.
I’ll not take my clothes off tonight.
I’ll give the animals an aspirin.

(from Nella Last’s World War II diary, 1941)