Commentary from The Writing Life via Substack, followed by a link to a poem from the Poetry Foundation; others are accessible by clicking on their names below. (GAZA and UKRAINE entries are HERE and HERE.) — MCM 

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On Memorial Day, by Matt Taibbi | The Writing Life  As a boy I read Wilfred Owen’s famous poem about World War I, describing the suffering of young men sent by industrial powers to die in clouds of poison gas. It’s a warning: if you saw what Owen did, and your nights were tormented by visions of blood and death, “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.” / Owen was killed in November 1918, a week before the Armistice. In his poems you read a soldier’s hope that boys like me would read them before they became old enough to want to prove themselves in combat. God didn’t design us to be killers, he said, noting we aren’t born with claws or talons, and a boy’s teeth are more suited for “laughing round an apple.” I know that’s true of my children, who’ll be taught to remember soldiers like Owen today.

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‘Arms and the Boy,’ by Wilfred Owen | Poetry Foundation  Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade / How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; / Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash; / And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh. / Lend him to stroke these . . . READ MORE . . .