Ukraine’s Thermopylae–and Our Own

By Robin Bates | Published: May 2, 2022
Statue of Sparta’s King Leonidas at Thermopylae

Tuesday

Last week I cited A. E. Housman’s poem about the Battle of Thermopylae as I looked at the Ukrainian stalwarts striving to hold off the superior Russian forces in the city of Mariupol. Upon reading the post, my friend and tennis partner Walter Kurtz, a (mostly) retired judge and bronze star recipient for his service in Vietnam, alerted me to Greek poet C.P. Cavafy’s poem about the famous battle.

He says he carries it around with him, and I can see why. After all, we want our judges to be

in all things virtuous,
But never so hardened by virtue as not to be

Compassionate, available to pity…

In Walter’s case, the invading Persian hoards would be threats to the cause of justice. Cavafy wants us all, like the Greeks warriors, to stay focused on our sacred mission, never allowing ourselves to be “distracted from what is right to do, and right to be.” I imagine Walter holding himself to those standards as he listens to cases and makes rulings.

But back to the actual battle. The Greeks were finally defeated when a traitor, Ephialtes, betrayed his countrymen by showing the Medes and the Persians a goat path around the mountain passage that the Greeks were defending. In the end, the Greeks were slaughtered because they were attacked from the front and the back both. Cafavy is saying that we must stick to our principles and fight the good fight, even though we know it is only a matter of time before we will be betrayed and experience defeat. Even though we know we live in a world where scoundrels often prevail over the virtuous, we can’t surrender in our own private Thermopylaes—which is to say, we can’t sell out what is right and true as we encounter life’s challenges. Here’s the poem:

Thermopylae
By C.P. Cavafy
Translated by David Ferry

Honor is due to those who are keeping watch,
Sentinels guarding their own Thermopylae;
Never distracted from what is right to do,
And right to be; in all things virtuous,
But never so hardened by virtue as not to be

Compassionate, available to pity;
Generous if they’re rich, but generous too,
Doing whatever they can, if they are poor;
Always true to the truth, no matter what,
But never scornful of those who have to lie.

Even more honor is due when, keeping watch,
They see that the time will come when Ephialtes
Will tell the secret to the Medes and they
Will know the way to get in through the goat-path.

The Ukrainian holdouts may not encounter betrayal (except for Russia’s broken promises of safe passage for the remaining civilians), but they must know that they are on the verge of losing everything.

Everything, that is, but their honor.

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On Ramadan and Song of Solomon

By Robin Bates | Published: May 1, 2022

Monday – Eid al-Fitr 

Muslims celebrate Islam’s feast of Eid al-Fitr today (some celebrated it yesterday), and my Pakistani student—who has been Ramadan fasting since April 1–found that his religious observance gave him special insight into Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In his essay Hamza found something familiar in the protagonist’s search to connect with a rich family lore.

In the novel, Milkman is a selfish and self-absorbed young man who begins finding meaning in his life when the journey he’s taking unexpectedly becomes a roots quest. He discovers that his great grandfather was (so local legend has it) one of the “flying slaves” who flew back to Africa, and other parts of Milkman’s past become clear to him as well. Suddenly, knowledge of family history becomes more important than material things. Hamza noted that Morrison employs magical realism to capture Milkman’s breakthrough, with a limp that he has had all his life suddenly disappearing. As a result of his journey, he finds himself grounded as he has never been before:

[H]e found himself exhilarated by simply walking the earth. Walking it like he belonged on it; like his legs were stalks, tree trunks, a part of his body that extended down down down into the rock and soil, and were comfortable there—on the earth and on the place where he walked. And he did not limp.

By the end, there’s even a (magical realist) possibility that Milkman can fly. Here’s the final paragraph, which describes Milkman facing up to his BFF-turned-enemy, who is about to kill him:

Milkman stopped waving and narrowed his eyes. He could just make out Guitar’s head and shoulders in the dark. “You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now. “You need it? Here.” Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it

By the end of the novel, Hamza writes, Milkman reconnecting with his family history and his culture “helps him find a sense of spirituality”:

To explain what is meant by Milkman being spiritually charged, we can compare Milkman’s realizations to the religious practice of fasting during Ramadan for Muslims. In Ramadan, Muslims do not eat or drink from sunrise to sunset. This on the surface may seem like a simple fast but in actuality has a deeper spiritual meaning to Muslims as it allows them to see one another as humans who face the same struggles as themselves. For example, rich and wealthy Muslims experience the same hunger and thirst as poor Muslims, which sparks a sense of humbleness in them. Milkman’s journey to learn about his family sparks the same types of realizations, as his experience during the hunt makes him understand that he has taken his privilege for granted. Learning about his family allows him to see his parents as humans who are not perfect and a product of unfavorable circumstances. These realizations and experiences thus are very transformative for Milkman and result in cultural and spiritual enrichment, very similar to how the month of Ramadan spiritually enriches Muslims.

Hamza concludes:

Milkman has come a long way from being a narrow person to someone who is spiritually charged and cares about others. Toni Morrison uses Milkman taking a leap and surrendering himself to the wind as magical realism symbolizing Milkman’s ascension to self-actualization. Having buried his grandfather’s bones and connected with his family ancestors, Milkman’s character has evolved to the point where he has faith in his ability to fly. By the end of this novel, Milkman, through his quest for self-realization, has evolved from a shallow person who limps to a culturally enriched and deeply developed character who can fly.

When we discussed his paper, Hamza added that to have bad thoughts about someone during Ramadan is another way to violate the fast. Worshippers must focus on love and understanding, both of which come to Milkman in the late stages of his own journey. That in turn led us to examine Milkman’s friend Guitar, who has found a different purpose to his life.

Guitar, once a sensitive and admirable man, has become so unhinged by racial injustice that he has taken it upon himself to (as he sees it) right the imbalance: he joins a group that kills an innocent White for every innocent Black who is murdered. Murderous violence takes on a dynamic of its own, however (as Martin Luther King Jr. recognized), and suddenly Guitar isn’t only targeting Whites. Blacks whom Guitar judges to have been overly accommodating to White society are also fair game, and amongst these he includes his former friend.

As I talked with Hamza, I thought of the recent Afghanistan Mosque bombings. A suicide bomber killed 50 Ramadan worshippers in a mosque three days ago and there was another bombing the following day. The violation of a religious observance meant to foster peace, understanding, love, and spiritual connection is comparable to Guitar killing Milkman and his aunt Pilate when they are ritually burying an ancestor’s bones.

In her novel, Morrison sees hate and love vying for supremacy in young Black men and, as her final paragraph notes, she’s not sure “which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother.” But she knows, as Hamza knows, which path brings us closer to spirit. Hate destroys the soul while love puts us in touch with the divine.

If we surrender to the air—if we surrender to the spirit—we can ride it.

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What Is Conversion?

By Robin Bates | Published: April 30, 2022
Caravaggio, Conversion on the Road to Damascus

Spiritual Sunday

I have an action-packed church service today, what with serving as crucifer, server, and lector. I’m particularly looking forward to reading the story of Saul/Paul’s road-to-Damascus conversion. It’s quite dramatic:

Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” [The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

The self-mocking narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has a fun take on the episode. Invisible Man has just found a new cause to believe in, one that he is sure will stick this time: he will join the Brotherhood, perhaps a reference to the American Communist Party. With his oratorical skills, he is sure he will go far:

Still, I liked my work during those days of certainty. I kept my eyes wide and ears alert. The Brotherhood was a world within a world and I was determined to discover all its secrets and to advance as far as I could. I saw no limits, it was the one organization in the whole country in which I could reach the very top and I meant to get there. Even if it meant climbing a mountain of words. For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words. Sometimes I sat watching the watery play of light upon Douglass’ portrait, thinking how magical it was that he had talked his way from slavery to a government ministry, and so swiftly. Perhaps, I thought, something of the kind is happening to me. Douglass came north to escape and find work in the shipyards; a big fellow in a sailor’s suit who, like me, had taken another name. What had his true name been? Whatever it was, it was as Douglass that he became himself, defined himself. And not as a boatwright as he’d expected, but as an orator. Perhaps the sense of magic lay in the unexpected transformations.

Had he had recalled his grandfather’s words at this moment, however, he might have been a bit more tempered in his enthusiasm:

“You start Saul, and end up Paul,” my grandfather had often said. “When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul — though you still Sauls around on the side.”

Don’t go thinking you’ve become a saint, in other words.

Poet Sir John Betjeman also has a tempered view of transformation. In “The Conversion of St. Paul,” he notes that most of us do not have Paul’s blinding come-to-Jesus moment. The process is more of a stumbling and blindly groping affair.

The Conversion of St. Paul
By Sir John Betjeman

What is conversion? Not at all
For me the experience of St Paul,
No blinding light, a fitful glow
Is all the light of faith I know
Which sometimes goes completely out
And leaves me plunging into doubt
Until I will myself to go
And worship in God’s house below —
My parish church — and even there
I find distractions everywhere.

What is Conversion? Turning round
To gaze upon a love profound.
For some of us see Jesus plain
And never once look back again,
And some of us have seen and known
And turned and gone away alone,
But most of us turn slow to see
The figure hanging on a tree
And stumble on and blindly grope
Upheld by intermittent hope.
God grant before we die we all
May see the light as did St Paul.

I’ll have to admit my experiences have been more like Betjeman’s than like Paul’s. Then again, God accepts us, whatever road we take to get there.

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Life’s Grip Is as Strong as Death’s

By Robin Bates | Published: April 28, 2022
Justin carrying the cross at the National Cathedral

Friday

Every year at this time, Julia and I pause to remember our oldest child, who died in a freak drowning accident on April 30, 2000. Justin was 21 at the time and, feeling exuberant on a beautiful spring day, he flung himself into the St. Mary’s River—a place where he had swum as a child—only to be grabbed by a rogue current and swept away. Life moved on, as life does, and our other two sons have given us five grandchildren between them, so we have much to be thankful for. Still, the wound of loss never entirely heals. Nor do I want it to since the pain somehow keeps him present.

Language can never do justice to the death of someone we love, but poetry comes closer than any other form of language to articulating our feelings, so as usual I share a poem. Today I turn to that luminous poet Jane Hirschfield, who captures both the way we acclimatize ourselves to a death and how it always remains poignant. After the poet makes her observation about the potency of life–a version of Dylan Thomas’s “And death shall have no dominion”–I love how she slips into an understated but oh so powerful parenthetical aside.

In that second ending, the distant comes close to where we can touch it again. The abstract yields to the personal.

Poem with Two Endings
By Jane Hirschfield

Say ‘death’ and the whole room freezes –
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it,
hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)

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During War, Poetry a Necessity

By Robin Bates | Published: April 27, 2022
Ukrainian poet (from Kharkiv) Anastasia Afanasieva

Thursday

Ukrainian American poet Ilya Kaminsky has a moving essay in Oprah Daily on the necessity of poetry in tough times. In it, he tells the story of a friend who, while spending whole nights in Kyiv subway stations serving as bomb shelters, has taken to

reciting poems to herself and those around her to keep sane. When she grows tired, she starts translating those poems into other languages, just as a way of keeping going.

Her story prompts Kaminsky to observe,

Critics in the West often ask whether poetry matters. I now realize that the only valid response to this question is: Do such critics matter? If a person sheltering deep underground as her city is bombed recites poems as a survival tool—to soothe herself and others—that is all the evidence I need that poetry matters.

And then he adds,

But we humans always knew that.

Yes, we always have known that. It’s just that sometimes we need reminding. I, of course, seek to remind you daily of this. But my reminders don’t have the fierce urgency that Kaminsky has as he reports experiences of poet friends still in Ukraine.

For instance, there’s his friend from Kharkiv, Anastasia Afanasieva, who “took a long break from poetry” to set up a successful business selling fishhooks but, with Russian bombs now having destroyed the business, she’s back to writing poetry again. Although in the past she won two of Russia’s top awards for poetry, Afanasieva has now shifted to Ukrainian. One poem, where she describes the decision, begins in Russian but shifts to her national language midway through.

Kaminsky quotes from her e-mail to him, which he observes reads at time like a prose poem:

Since the war started, I feel it’s like one long day: I still don’t know what day of the week it is or what date. The past was cancelled in one minute. Imagine a magic eraser, which erases all the text in one moment from the paper—and paper becomes white as a new snow. Personal past is no more. No former goals, no former job, no former habits, no former stores we used to visit for groceries every day, no former walking routes, no former landscapes, no home, no former dreams—pure nothing. You’re born again at the age of 40—having only a book of memories with you, a book, which you read till the end and there are no new chapters. And you, like a newborn, try to learn to walk and speak again.

“Poetry,” Kaminsky concludes,

now is as necessary as ever. Not because it is pretty or fancy. But because it helps us to articulate the most impossible moments: It gives us a gasp, a scrap of air in our lungs. When we have nothing else, we can still hold a handful of words in our memory, a tune, and that might be all we have got now to survive—we don’t know yet. But if we are lucky, it is there.

And then he leaves off with this advice:

 Keep it safe, this verbal music. Memorize new line poems if you can. You might need them one day, war planes or not. When facing the blank wall that is crisis, everyone needs a bit of music, a tune, a balm.

During the German blitzkrieg of 1940 and 1941, London bookstores apparently sold out their poetry. If there are any bookstores left intact in Ukraine, I suspect they have as well.

Additional Afanasieva poem: I believe the following poem, translated from the Russian by Olga Livshin and Andrew Janco, was written after the Russian invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014. Reading it now, one thinks of those Ukrainian refugees who, having escaped to the west, are now returning home, in spite of the danger. As the poem notes, people sometimes hear a call that overrides all other considerations:

That’s my home. . .

1

That’s my home.
There was a bridge here.
Now there isn’t.

That’s my home.
That’s my yard.
It’s still here.

Where a bridge stood,
there’s a river.
No more bridge.

Where there was once a pass,
now there’s a line.

We live here,
on the line.

In the devil’s belly,
that’s where.

2

I came back
Barely made it
Took a while to get everyone out
I have a big family
My parents are old
Then there are my
Brother my sister my
pregnant daughter
I got them all out
Out of that damned house
Just imagine
There’s a river
There was a bridge there
Now it’s destroyed
On the one side of the river these people
On the other side, those
Whoever they are
Between them, our house
It took me so many trips
There and back
For each person
I barely got them out
A big family
These on the one side, those on the other
The house stands like a shadow
As though lead passes through the walls
Or the house contorts its beams
So that it can dodge the hail of bullets
It twists left and right
What it took me, a woman
To get all of them out
You can’t imagine
One by one
Right from the belly of the beast
Coming back every time,
Diving into all of that,
Not knowing
If there will be a way
But I got them all out
And now my daughter
Yes, the pregnant one
Says she wants to return
She’s headed back tomorrow
She has someone there
A man she loves
See, he stayed back there
And love, well
You know how love goes
With those young people
You know how it is for them
Anything for love

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2 Battles: Thermopylae and Mariupol

By Robin Bates | Published: April 26, 2022
Stanley Meltzor, Battle of Thermopylae

Wednesday

Like much of the world, I’ve been thinking about those Ukrainians holed up in Mariupol, heroically resisting as Russia rains missiles down upon them. The Greeks resisting the Persian army at Thermopylae come to mind and, with them, A.E. Housman’s allusion to the battle.

Housman was a classicist as well as a poet, and details in “The Oracles” are drawn from Herodotus’s account of the famous battle. It took days of fighting before the large Persian army was able to overwhelm the smaller band. As Herodotus reports it, Xerxes imagined, somewhat like Putin, that the Greeks would simply retreat rather than stand and fight. After all, the numbers were all on his side. Here’s the famous Greek historian:

Hearing this Xerxes was not able to conjecture the truth about the matter, namely that they were preparing themselves to die and to deal death to the enemy so far as they might; but it seemed to him that they were acting in a manner merely ridiculous…

In Herodotus’s telling, an informant with inside information told Xerxes,

Hear then now also: these men have come to fight with us for the passage, and this is it that they are preparing to do; for they have a custom which is as follows: whenever they are about to put their lives in peril, they attend to the arrangement of their hair.

The Spartan king Leonidas, meanwhile, had been told an oracle that (again, according to Herodotus) either the Spartan capital of Lacedaemon would be “sacked by the children of Perseus” (the Persians) or he himself would die:

O ye men who dwell in the streets of broad Lacedaemon!
Either your glorious town shall be sacked by the children of Perseus,
Or, in exchange, must all through the whole Laconian country
Mourn for the loss of a king, descendant of great Heracles.

When, after four days of waiting, Xerxes did not witness the expected Greek retreat, he attacked. Even then it took numerous assaults, three days of fighting, and a Greek betrayal before he finally broke through.

In Housman’s poem, two oracles are mentioned: the Oracle of Dodona and the Oracle of  Delphi (“the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain”). That the oracles of old are now mute doesn’t bother the speaker. After all, he’s not important enough to warrant an oracle, and besides he has his own oracle–“the heart within”—that tells him he’s going to die. Therefore he tells the oracle priestess, whom he impudently calls “my lass,” to can it. Combining a stoic fatalism with a dash of bravado, he tells her,

Oh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it;
  But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more.
’Tis true there’s better booze than brine, but he that drowns must drink it;
  And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.

In the face of overwhelming odds and expecting the worst, the Spartans calmly sat down and combed their hair. The speaker imagines himself doing something similar in the face of his own imminent death.

The Oracles
By. A.E. Housman

’Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain
  When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled,
And mute’s the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain,
  And echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old.

I took my question to the shrine that has not ceased from speaking,
  The heart within, that tells the truth and tells it twice as plain;
And from the cave of oracles I hear the priestess shrieking
  That she and I should surely die and never live again.

Oh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it;
  But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more.
’Tis true there’s better booze than brine, but he that drowns must drink it;
  And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.

The king with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
  Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.
And he that stands must die for naught, and home there’s no returning.
  The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.

I doubt that the Mariupol defenders are combing their hair, but they appear to be no less stoic. And like Leonidas and his followers, they are setting themselves up to become legendary in their turn.

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Book Bans Leave Children Defenseless

By Robin Bates | Published: April 25, 2022

Tuesday

The dispiriting news about school libraries forced to remove books continues, with the latest culprit being Walton County Schools in Florida. What strikes me about this particular list is the number of quality works found on it, including a Booker Prize winner, a Nobel Prize winner, and a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature winner. A number of these works I’ve actually read (which isn’t always the case) and so can personally vouch for.

First, though, I like the explanation offered up by New York Times columnist Charles Blow for the sudden spate of book bans and Critical Race Theory panic. Here he is on twitter:

During the summer of protests after the murder of George Floyd, millions of ppl – including incredible numbers of white kids – marched in defense of black lives. This shook the white conservative establishment to its core. In their minds their children had been indoctrinated.

All of the CRT panic, book banning and anti-protest laws are a direct response to this. They are trying to push white children’s exposure to – and sympathy for – racial issues back to the dark ages of Jim Crow ignorance. It is a simple as it is shocking.

Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize-winning Beloved is on the list. So is Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things. And Sherman Alexiewas a Young People’s Literature award winner for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Here’s the list of books removed from the Walton County School shelves:

–Mariko Tamaki, The One Summer
–Judy Blume, Forever;
–Christina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban;
–Diana Gabaldon, Outlander;
–Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things;
–Alex Gino, George;
–E. Lockhart, Real Live Boyfriends;
–Ellen Hopkins, Tricks
–Jennifer Mathieu, The Truth about Alice;
–Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close;
–Charlaine Harris, Dead until Dark;
— Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me
–Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts;
–Raina Telgemeier, Drama
–Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury;
–Toni Morrison, Beloved;
–Angie Thomas, The Hate You Give;
–Lois Duncan, Killing Mr. Griffin;
–Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why;
–Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes;
–Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye;
–Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian;
–Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner Graphic Novel;
–Brian Katcher, Almost Perfect

I’ve taught Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Beloved and Roy’s God of Small Things in various classes and led discussions of Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Hosseini’s The Kite Runner Graphic Novel in my book discussion group. No race, class or ethnicity is idealized or demonized in these books. Instead, we see characters caught up in systems that are beyond their control and who try, with the limited resources they have, to make do. Sometimes they survive, sometimes they are crushed, but their humanity invariably shines through.

For those who oppose the idea of multicultural democracy, all these works are a threat.  By challenging us to empathize with people unlike ourselves—and showing the harm that comes from intolerance—they function as an implicit criticism of those who want to hide their children in a safe, antiseptic and White bubble. In Bluest Eye, we watch the disintegration of a little Black girl who wants to look like Shirley Temple and who is abused by the adults in her world. In Beloved, we watch the horrors of slavery at work, including how it pressures African Americans to commit horrors themselves. In God of Small Things, attempts to challenge the caste system—along with scars left over from colonial rule—destroy two children. In Kite Runner ethnic and class hatreds destroy a beautiful childhood friendship.

Claiming that they are acting to protect their children, rightwing parents cancel works that might prompt their kids to think differently than they do. And they’re not wrong. These works will indeed open minds to other worlds and other perspectives. But if you raise your kids to fear those worlds and those perspectives, you will turn them into frightened creatures like yourselves.

As Bigger Thomas’s defense attorney says of such people in Richard Wright’s Native Son,

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.

What they do not realize is that, through reading challenging literature, their children will learn how to negotiate the world, not live in fear of it. And as thinking beings, they will refuse to be pawns.

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They Fell with Their Faces to the Foe

By Robin Bates | Published: April 24, 2022
Battle of Gallipoli

Monday – Anzac Day

Today is the day that Australia and New Zealand remember their war dead, it being the anniversary of World War I’s Battle of Gallipoli. An expeditionary force made up of many Australians and New Zealanders landed at the Turkish Dardanelles on April 25, 1915, and the subsequent campaign would cost both sides a combined 250,000 casualties before the Turks emerged victorious. Just a few months ago we thought such carnage was behind us, only to see World War-style horrors return to the world stage.

Following another 1914 battle, this one where the Germans defeated the British at the Battle of the Mons, Laurence Binyon wrote “For the Fallen.” The fourth stanza is frequently quoted at occasions like Anzac Day:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

While I love that stanza, the rest of the poem has sometimes struck me as romanticizing death in battle, the way that Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” romanticizes it. (I express some of my reservations about such romanticizing here). I’ve always been more drawn to the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who exposes it. In his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” for instance, he refers to the poetic line of the Roman poet Horace—“Sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country”—only to call it a lie. If you could see a man dying of poison gas, he tells the reader,

you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The Ukrainians defending their homeland, however, has me thinking differently. Just because we acknowledge the horrors of war does not mean that we should close our eyes to combat heroism. “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes,” says Galileo in Brecht’s play of that name, but when the times are indeed unhappy, we must honor those who step up. I find myself thinking of those brave souls defending Mariupol against impossible odds. When tyrants strike, brave acts are called for, and that’s what Binyon’s poem honors.

So here’s to all those who fall “in the cause of the free.” As Binyon puts it, “they are known as the stars are known to the Night,” and “to the end, to the end, they remain.”

For the Fallen
By Laurence Binyon

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal 
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: 
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; 
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labor of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound, 
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, 
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, 
To the end, to the end, they remain.

Added note: I just discovered that Rupert Brooke died on his way to Gallipoli, being felled by an infected mosquito bite on April 23, two days before the landing. His well-known poem “The Soldier” contributes to the romanticization that I have always been wary of. And yet, in the current situation, I can imagine it bringing solace to those Ukrainians battling the Russian invaders.

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Different Ways to Pray

By Robin Bates | Published: April 23, 2022
Goodall, The Ploughman and the Shepherdess: Time of the Evening Prayer (1897)

Spiritual Sunday

My dear friend Sue Schmidt alerted me to this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, who is the daughter of a Palestinian Muslim father and an American Christian mother. “Different Ways to Pray” is a reminder that God is bigger than any of the rituals we devise to get in touch with the divine. When we confuse religious practice with God, we get into trouble. Sometimes, Nye reminds us, talking with God is like talking with goats and involves laughter:

Different Ways to Pray
By Naomi Shihab Nye

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.
Time? — The old ones prayed for the young ones.
They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.

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