All the poets can do is warn. --Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918

All Melanie really needed was some attention. It seems that no sooner had I acknowledged her presence that she began to relax her grip. Oh she's still here. She's always here. But she's not clutching like she was, not whining to be petted and played with. Over this week I began to regain my clarity of thought, my determination to move forward with my plans. It remains a fact, however, that I have written the same things and felt the same determination to follow through with the same plans every March for as long as I've been keeping journals (ten years of nearly daily writing, ten years before that of spotty notations). Every year I make the same plans -- lose weight, finish my book, declutter my house, keep in touch more with old friends, make new friends.

But it was warm this morning, and dry. And so I walked Woodridge, for the first time in many months. Water and walking, I've come to believe, are the two things most likely to help me lose weight, increase my physical and mental stamina, and keep depression at bay. Back in August I was walking two, three, sometimes more hours a day, in Boston because that was the only way to get around, and then at Thoreau's Walden Pond and in Robert Frost's Vermont because the unfinished business that had sent me to those poets' shrines had to be worked out physically as well as mentally.

At the end of last week the Lenten devotional I've been following focused on the story of the woman bent over for eighteen years. The directions were to visualize all your burdens, your cares, your plans, your obstacles to success, as being carried on your back, weighing you down, bending you over. That particular image is a favorite of mine -- suitcase of memories, troubles packed up in an old kit bag -- and so I worked with it, carried it, and took it with me to church.

In my congregation, the assisting minister is a lay person who sings part of the liturgy, offers the common cup at Communion, and leads the prayers of the faithful, which he or she writes himself. It is always appropriate to mention those we've learned are sick or hospitalized, the friends and family members of anyone who has died, and those members present who have indicated that it is their birthday or their wedding anniversary. We also have the latitude to include concerns or celebrations of community and world events. When I filled this role during Le Miz, I asked blessings on the efforts of the young people of our congregation to portray the wretched of the earth, and that we be kept mindful of those nameless, faceless souls who are wretched indeed. On the eve of Le Bliz I asked that the Lord not be too annoyed that the same people who had prayed for precipitation all summer were now praying for not too much of it. 

A stranger visiting with us this morning might have concluded that we are a community concerned only with ourselves. The assisting minister called for blessings by name on the sick, the recovering, the newly born, and the celebrating. That there are empty chairs at empty tables among our military families, and the wretched of the earth cry out to us from a land about to be torn apart, went unacknowledged.

"With near certain war in Iraq looming in the very near future, I feel, like many writers, that I need to express my own feelings about the situation," writes Rob Rummel-Hudson, a fellow on-line journaller whose work I follow from time to time. His piece for March 15, 2003 is an eloquent exploration of the roots of his pacifism, in part inspired by the work of World War I poet Wilfred Owen. 

I wish I could be as articulate as Rob. I see myself as a poet, a maker of written work, and it is the function of poets to say for others what they cannot say for themselves. I've written about war only once in this space, in April of 1999, and I didn't say much there except to say ain't it awful that people I don't know in a country I will never visit are suffering the ravages of war. In truth, I shrink from trying to explain my feelings about this looming war. And that's because they're just that --feelings. No facts. No figures. Only a belief that war is unhealthy for children and other living things. I'm just another mother for peace.