There’s something spiritual tugging at my heart strings.Â? Please pray for me in the next few days that I can be open and listen as to what it might be.Â? I’ll post on it once I can vocalize it.
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Good Things
I need to remind myself of these things.
[=] Judging awesome kids at the speech meet yesterday and finding out that one of my policy debate kids was actually our communion assistant at Synod Assembly.
[=] Singing awesome music this morning at the Lutheran church in Shelby. (Thank you Carolyn for inviting me to sing.)
[=] Hanging out with one of my church kids and talking to her for an hour after the nursing home service.
[=] Accidentally walking out of the house in my We Will Not Be Silent shirt for choir practice and nobody saying a word.
A Song for Veteran’s Day
One of my speech kids did this as a serious solo piece today and it was very timely.Â? (He based it off of the Dropkick Murphys song though it’s actually a fairly well-known Irish folk song.)
Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did the play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fir o’er you as they lowered you down?
Did the bugles sound The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?
The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you “The Cause?”
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Mmmmmm…
Warm office.
Space heater at my feet.
Black cat playing cave kitty and foot warmer.
Tabby patch monster asleep looking sweet.
Men in Trees and Women’s Murder Club TIVOing for me to watch later.
It almost makes up for the craptactular parts of my day.