This is the new blog...CONFESSION ZERO
Showing posts with label virginia Tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label virginia Tech. Show all posts

AWAITING

The student who shot dead at least 30 people at Virginia Tech sent a package to the US TV network NBC News on the day of the shootings, police said.
The package contained "disturbing" photographs, video and writings, NBC said, posted from the college campus between the two rounds of killings.
Cho Seung-hui is shown pointing guns at the camera, and ranting angrily.
A total of 33 people, including the gunman himself, died in shootings at two locations on Monday.
"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," the 23-year-old gunman said angrily, in an excerpt shown on NBC Nightly News. (
More...)

4 bombs kill 178 in Iraq
By Sinan Salaheddin The Associated Press

Baghdad - Four large bombs exploded in mostly Shiite areas of Baghdad today, killing at least 178 people and wounding scores - the deadliest day in the city since the start of the U.S.-Iraqi campaign to pacify the capital two months ago.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the bombings "horrifying" and accused al-Qaida of being behind them.
In the deadliest of the attacks, a parked car bomb detonated in a crowd of workers at the Sadriyah market in central Baghdad, killing at least 122 people and wounding 148, said Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken.


When sorrows come,
they come not single spies,
But in battalions.
-W. Shakespeare

They are scattered all around us
Smeared on windshields and sidewalks.
Look now upon your hands and feet;
The ashes of this unfortunate world.
Up and down the streets they blow
From church to church and home to home
Awaiting the repeat of solemn gunfire
To devour the bodies down in yearning.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones.
-W. Shakespeare

Coursing ever so steady comes our bewilderment
Leading us into much that is relief
For their names may well have been our own
Crouched upon the merciless floor.
It moves inside of us like some dead thing

Giving crumbs to nourish our imaginings
Of those and their private room of horror,
But all of our shelter is paralyzed by battle.

Give sorrow words.

The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o're-fraught heart,

And bids it break.
-W. Shakespeare


Calling out now to clergy our urgent need for comfort.
“Speak of God. Why didn't he hold him from this rage?
Shroud the dead, place his hand over their cowering?”
Now the answer we’ve come to cherish, “God’s plan.”
Thirty-three? What of one hundred and seventy?
Does God find them worthy of nails through their palms,
To suffer a hell that can't be quenched in daily loss?
They are scattered about with our fingerprints upon them
And, as with so much of our beauty, a gun takes them away.

Our nation is somewhat sad,

But we're angry.
There's a certain level of blood lust,
But we won't let it drive our reaction.
We're steady,
Clear-eyed and patient, but pretty soon
We'll have to start displaying scalps.
-W


© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman

HEMORRHAGE




The pain of the Massacre in Virginia is still raw as we try to make sense of it all. The airwaves are inundated with breaking news as we grasp for some reason, some way we could have prevented it, some sign we can identify to ensure it never happens again. When you consider the enormity of this incident, the impact it has had nationally and more specifically in Blacksburg and more significantly among those who knew and loved the 33 fallen souls it is easy to be overwhelmed. People are not supposed to die at the hands of disgruntled mad men for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Young college kids on the cusp of making a life for themselves should not be senselessly slain before having the opportunity to contribute to making the world a better place. And that is what happened.
And 6000 miles away a similar atrocity replays every single day. We so easily get caught up in the political rhetoric of being for or against the war in Iraq and our words have begun to sound hollow as we consider one lesson we can take from Virginia. The circumstances of death in Virginia and Iraq bear little in common but in the end the results are sadly similar. Families are mourning their dead. So I guess it doesn’t matter much if you support the President’s war in Iraq or oppose it so long as an end to the violence is your primary goal. In the week of March 21 – 27 the daily
death count of civilians in Iraq were 58, 90, 54, 79, 26, 34 and 276. The mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters and the grandparents and grandchildren of Iraqi dead see death counts similar to those which have suddenly grabbed our attention as the rule and not the exception.

Please pray for the families of the senselessly murdered students from Virginia but save a little prayer time for families in Iraq. (By Chris Wilcox)


Thirty-three crows strut crudely before me,
Their black beaks pounding the ground;
Echoes of a distant thinking
Rebelling against the wind.

Thirty-three far-flung voices climbed the sky,
Their stained hands groping plaintively near;
Spirits of the far-away land
Absently rasping the storm.

Thirty-three students prone upon their loss,
Hemorrhage in the shock of undue vacancy;
Stunned gasps rasp our ears
With a hollow astonishment.


© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman



Prose Before Hos (33 Dead Americans - 33 Dead Iraqis)

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