Samantha Power Goes to War says a headline in The Nation. Samantha Power is of Irish origin – a Dublin-born human rights author as The Nation depicts her, while stating that Obama's war bears her intellectual imprint.
It makes me think of a poem line, which I love, of another American with Irish blood. It goes
what kind of Yank comes in the dead of winter?
Thomas Lynch, the poet, is a peaceful man, in his life, in his work and in his "hobby" – writing essays and poems. So this line has nothing to do with war.
He is going to visit his family in Ireland, for the first time, and imagines what his great-aunt Nora Lynch is thinking when he stands in the gate of her garden, she looking at him from the doorway. [THE MOVEEN NOTEBOOK In memory of Nora Lynch (1902 – 1992)]
Why is it that this line, as peaceful as it is beautiful, comes in my mind, more and more, and out of context, when I hear from a wedding party in Iraq, turned into a slough of despond by American soldiers, when I hear from a drone, hitting an Afghan school and leaving dead most of the children … and now seeing the bodies, called collateral damage because the rebels in Libya have some more market value than the lives Gadhafi has in his hands?
what kind of Yank comes in the dead of winter?
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