On the Third Anniversary of the Ongoing War in Iraq: a letter to Hayden Carruth.

• Author: Hamill, Sam
• Position: Poem

On the Third Anniversary of the Ongoing War in Iraq a letter to Hayden Carruth It's been nearly forty years since you wrote that poem about writing poems against all those wars, Harlan County to Italy and Spain. When your Selected Poems arrived today, it was one of the poems that gave me pause reading it again. We've been at war ever since. I too, born in World War, have lived and written against that particular stupidity and pointless, hopeless pain all my agonizing days. Has even a single life thereby been saved? Who can say? Except that doing so saved mine. Oh, I could tell you about saved lives. There was that beautiful young woman in Sitka whose husband, jealous of her poetry, tied her feet together with a rope and threw her from his boat. You have about 12 minutes of life in those southeast Alaskan waters. Or the grandmother in Utah who wrote rhymed, romantic sonnets and called me late one night in my motel because...