Harmony Holiday, I Swear to God
Like your teacher Galway Kinnell, you’re an inspiration—a muse among the ashes.
By Michael Judge
Iowa City, Iowa
Harmony Holiday, I swear to God, every word that follows is true yet will do nothing to save your burning City of Angels, so far from me here, near the city of your birth, your first words, your father’s song—Waterloo.
Your staggering Substack column this week, “Fire Walked Like Me,” sent me to my bookshelf searching for a poem from The Book of Nightmares (1971) by your teacher Galway Kinnell, now ten years gone, “The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible.” The poem, as you write in your column, is in the voice of a soldier “shooting his way through a field as tears and smoke blur his vision, mourning each person he kills, hallucinating their eternal return to him. Compassion and compulsion, survival and evil, love and murder, mercantilism and its no mercy eyes-on-the-road double agent of poetry and combat, going forward, out of the line of fire he himself creates.”
Lieutenant! This…
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