History, as presented through historians, is the accumulation of selected data, woven into overlapping, contradictory, reinforcing, alternative, independent narratives. We animate the narratives through our individual, evolving, understandings. The scope of history is as broad as everything and as narrow as something (or someone). As students, we shape the shapes presented and represented by historians.

Akin to history, particularly the historical narrative of a participant in the events within the narration, poetry, a poem, kindles our imaginations, our imaging, of realities without images, without physical representations, other than those birthed out of our imagings. Through excursions through poems, composed through centuries, and across the globe, we can track unbroken threads, chords, that link descendants to ancestors, and that join, introduce, past to present.

All life is mortal and death is ubiquitous. But organized killing, sanctioned or not, by the state or by appeal to a higher (or lower) authority, if at times seemingly ubiquitous, is never inevitable. And, yet, killing runs unbroken from dawn to dusk.

Reading a recently published anthology of war poems, poems of, on, about, war, from the dawn of the printing press, or quill, ink and papyrus, to a dusk that eludes our grasp, we observe (no, we imagine, we image, we see, we feel, we hear) how some things, and each of us, “never change.” To paraphrase Norman Maclean, eventually all things merge into one and a poem runs through it.