Section 95 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 February 28 Saturday.
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The baby bed was delivered on Sunday 22, and now stands in the tatami room, the master bedroom. As yet, there is no baby in evidence, because the manufacturing process has not yet been completed.

It takes, I'm surprised to find, a rather incredible nine months to manufacture a baby, and, as the months have gone by - there's not long to go now - I've found myself thinking, on occasion, how wasteful it would be to go to all this effort only have the finished result blown apart by stepping on someone's landmine, or something like that.

There's a revisioning process going on here, a "seeing freshly" process, squeezed in awkwardly between commuting and teaching and juggling deadlines of one kind or another. In the modern world we have to do our philosophizing with someone else's cellphone ringing in our ears.

In this kind of mood, today I put together a page with links to all my war poems, of which there are currently fifteen (plus some disorganized Trojan War material.)

And now I'm sitting here at the keyboard trying to think of some encapsulating comment to wrap around the poems, and I can't. But that's the context in which I've been rereading my own poems: an awareness of the existence of a child not yet born coupled with a consciousness of ... well ... the war world which is looking more and more like the future.

(Writing the words "war world," I find a vague image stirring to life, an image I can't quite put into words. A deep black gullet, huge, with red in it. Leading down.)