"More Light! More Light!"

St. Louis with scepter
and crown of thorns

Eight hundred years ago this year, St. Louis a.k.a. Louis IX was born. Surely his dust is spinning in the grave, and surely his devout mother, Blanche of Castile, has averted her face from the city of his name, wounded by the endless complications and after-shocks of our inhumanity to one another...

Somehow I think of Anthony Hecht's powerful "More Light! More Light!" with the death of Latimer (or Ridley, or someone like them) juxtaposed to the two Jews and the Pole and the lawless soldier with his Lüger at the edge of a German wood. Perhaps today Anthony Hecht would have told some two-stranded story in bullets and hammers, and Goethe's dying words would still be a proper title.

Mine is not a blog meant for politics, nor do I feel that writers have more rights to speak than any others. Certainly I do not feel than I have more right to speak about the events of these days than anyone on the face of the planet. All I say is that tonight I cannot get that poem out of my head. And I will think on that simple, difficult thing: "Let us love one another."