The hand of peace and love--

 A hand of hard-earned peace and love on Memorial Day.
Image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing)

       To the hour when Cain is ever slaying Abel
       In the dark eternal backward.

                               --from Thaliad

Sun Dry Fie(d)

Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass

Advance apologies
I may be on a little less often for the next ten days, as I have two major child-ferrying trips plus other company arriving for a stay. And there is much to do to get ready.

The Glimmerglass News
Things are progressing on Glimmerglass. It's very hard to top the beauty of design and art for Thaliad and The Foliate Head, but it may well be happening, thanks to Clive Hicks-Jenkins and the design team of Burt and Burt, designers for Mercer. Yesterday I had an advance peek at the jacket (not quite finished, as it didn't yet have blurbs or description on), and it is the most clever, cunning, beautiful thing... I even love the spine, and that's downright odd!

Thanks 
to all the people who responded here and there to this:

Phoenicia Publishing ‏@phoeniciapubl  May 23

Today, why not support poets&independent publishing - how about Thaliad by @marlyyoumans, art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins? pic.twitter.com/gaexiESWKx

Rebecca Beatrice Miller
End of year project at The Center for Cartoon Studies--a 25-page comic called Castle. Shall be glad to see the young graphic novelist some time soon! I've enjoyed seeing her projects through the past year...

Memorial Day
Have a good Memorial Day weekend--my Scouts are out marching in the rain in today's parades. I'm remembering my father, a boy who joined up at 17 and was a tailgunner aboard Incendiary Blonde in World War II, along with many uncles who served in WWII and Korea. I'm remembering my deep-South ancestors who served (yes, they were on the Confederate side, and one of them, Col. James Washington Hance, died at Gettysburg and left behind a wife and three little daughters.) I'm also recalling the wild Revolution-era crowd led by my terribly colorful Wales-born ancestor, John Thomas, colonel and founder of the Spartan Regiment of South Carolina. Jane Black Thomas was a heroine of the Revolution, and sons, a son-in-law, and a daughter were notable figures in the fight for independence. What a sluice of struggle and death is the history of the world, pointing back to that first story of Cain slaying Abel!

2nd Lt. Ivar Hendrickson, Bombardier; S/Sgt Bufford Brown, Engineer;
S/Sgt Paige Paris, Radio Operator; S/Sgt Edward Fitzpatrick, Ball Turret Gunner; S/Sgt.
Hubert L. Youmans, Tailgunner. Two things come to mind about this picture.
One is that S/Sgt Blaine Corbin is missing, having recently been killed by flak
on a mission. The other is that my father (standing, far right) the future professor
has an odd-looking hand because he'd been in a fight the evening before.
He was a sharecropper's boy who plowed and sometimes rode the rails,
and he is in the mix of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage.

Miss Lila and Miss Kate's boys on Memorial Day

The Incendiary Blonde.  91st Bomb Group. 322nd Squadron, flying out
of RAF Bassingbourn. My father is the young man all the way to the right. I
believe he had reached the mature age of 19 when this photo was taken. It was
late in the war, and his friend Blaine Corbin, the mid waist gunner, had just been
killed. Life is full of ironies, and he died from shrapnel wounds on the last day
mid waist gunners were used. The crew was headed by 2nd Lt. William K.
Snipes, shown at center front. The navigator, 1st Lt. Otto Bremer, is on his
left, and the co-pilot, 1st Lt. Glen Crumbliss, to his right. Standing: 2nd Lt.
Ivar Hendrickson, Bombardier; Staff Sgt. Bufford Brown, Engineer; Staff Sgt.
 Paige Paris, Radio Operator; Staff Sgt. Edward Fitzpatrick, Ball Turret Gunner.
And then there's my father, hand on hip, the teenage tailgunner...

It's Memorial Day, and my youngest is on the march, drumming in several parades honoring veterans and the day. "Drummer Rigby," hacked on the streets of Woolwich, passes through my mind and moves on into his death.

I remember my maternal grandmother, Lila Eugenia Arnold Morris of Collins, Georgia. She was said to have worn holes in her bedside rug, so often was she kneeling, praying her five sons home from World War II. They all came back to her--Louis, Marvin, Hugh, Leonard, and James, although they have now been returned to her in another way, the last Morris brother having died a few years ago. Only my mother, the baby among Miss Lila's children, and her sister Julia remain among the living.

My father, Hubert Lafay Youmans, and his brother Dafford (a version of the Welsh Dafydd, it seems, as I also had an aunt named Dilly, close to Welsh Dilwys) also returned to Georgia and my paternal grandmother, Kate Deriso Youmans. My father joined the Army Air Corp when he was seventeen, and served as a tailgunner in World War II. They are all gone now, passed into the peace of death.

Patriotism is long out of fashion with writers and artists, it appears. And yet I thank the boys and young men they were for risking their sweet lives to bring on what they hoped would be a better world.