Night Sky on the Eve of October

A parting of clouds in the sky tonight

Left a small moaning moon in a sea of deep blue,

And banks of grey cloud, like cliffs

Encroaching the sea,

Blushed with moonlight like white rouge.

It was stunning, allow me to say,

And insisted itself on the night

As some God-drenched canvass

Of the American west

Might insist on meaning or purpose,

A sign in the sky.

And on another night in summer, say,

In the drench of one passion or other

I might want to believe.  

But it is October now

And the earth-bound world

Has its own emanations:

The smell of backyard bonfires in oil drums,

Clam bakes, chimney smoke,

And down by the lake

The sound like a stitching

The train makes on the town’s tracks.

Its whistle sings and

Dog barks echo as through a megaphone.

These redound in the brittle air

To themselves alone,

As if to say, here is the world you know,

And you have work to do.

That moon up there? It is small and cold.

The icy sea it floats in is sky,

As hollow as the barrel the dogs are barking in

Those clouds are just clouds,

Great banks of them.

And winter is closing in.

Ruling Out Shared Sacrifice

I'll be posting some things in anticipation of the 9/11 anniversary. I urge everyone to read this piece by Frank Rich http://nymag.com/print/?/news/9-11/10th-anniversary/frank-rich/
What I remember most about the day, and its immediate aftermath, was the readiness of people everywhere to do something. An enormous, enormous opportunity to engage the entire American people was forfeited.

The money quote from Rich's article:

"... the key move Bush made after 9/11 had nothing to do with military strategy or national-security policy. It was instead his considered decision to rule out shared sacrifice as a governing principle for the fight ahead. Sacrifice was high among the unifying ideals that many Americans hoped would emerge from the rubble of ground zero, where so many Good Samaritans had practiced it. But the president scuttled the notion on the first weekend after the attack, telling Americans that it was his "hope" that "they make no sacrifice whatsoever" beyond, perhaps, tolerating enhanced airline security. Few leaders in either party contradicted him. Bush would soon implore us to "get down to Disney World in Florida" and would even lend his image to a travel-industry ad promoting tourism. Our marching orders were to go shopping.
    From then on, it was a given that any human losses at wartime would be borne by a largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind, underpaid volunteer army and that the expense would be run up on a magic credit card. Even as the rising insurgency in Iraq began to stress American resources to the max in 2003, Bush doubled down on new tax cuts and pushed through a wildly extravagant new Medicare entitlement for prescription drugs to shore up his reelection prospects with elderly voters. David Walker, then the comptroller general, called it "the most reckless fiscal year in the history of the republic."