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What Is The Potential For Addiction - 1320 Words

6. Addiction- What is the potential for addiction? Is it physical or psychological? How severe is the addiction? Getting addicted to meth is not very hard. Because the dopamine release feels so pleasing, many people become obsessed and chase that feeling over and over again. Methamphetamine is known as one of the easiest drugs to become addicted to. The addiction is very severe, many people relapse after long periods without the drug. However, the more the drug is used, the harder it is to receive a â€Å"high†. Methamphetamine is both psychologically and physically addictive. The drug is known to be psychologically addictive because users have anxiety while in withdrawal to the drug. The drug is also physically addictive because the body†¦show more content†¦The effects last for differing amounts of time depending on the person. However, the longer of withdrawals last ten weeks. There are two phases for withdrawal, being â€Å"the crash† and â€Å"the craving s†. The crash lasts a few days and the cravings last up to ten days. The crash entails a lot of sleeping and eating; the cravings are pretty self-explanatory in that the user feels an extreme need for methamphetamine. Side effects for withdrawal include sweating, suicidal thinking, weight gain, low energy, weakness, and depression. 8. Pregnancy- What happens to the baby? How does it affect the baby during pregnancy? How does it affect the child long term? The baby is affected during pregnancy by an increased risk of premature birth, smaller size, lethargy, placenta disconnected from the uterus lining, and abnormalities of the brain and heart. However, research is still being done and there is no absolute conclusion to the side effects of meth use during pregnancy. Another problem with research is that the test samples have been very small and inconclusive about how many different drugs the mothers had been using. After birth, the babies often have trouble focusing and increase d stress which long term will make the baby’s life much more difficult. While in the mother’s body, researchers know the drug crosses directly through the placenta. However, researchers do not know whether the drug influences the fetus through the placenta or by

Decency clause still haunts the NEA Essay Example For Students

Decency clause still haunts the NEA Essay We have been engaged over the last four years, since the emergence of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano as apparent threats to the Republic, in an extended battle, both in the Congress and in the Executive Branch, over the development of standards designed to contain or scourge dangerous or subversive ideas from arts projects supported by the government. We are all aware of the repeated attempts by Senator Helms, the Robespierre of American cultural affairs, to impose content restrictions on federal funding in the arts. By and large these restrictions have been beaten back in Congress, with the current exception of the so-called decency clause, passed in November 1990, which provided that grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts are to be judged taking in consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public. That standard was challenged in a case involving Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller. The case had two major elements. The first, which has been recently settled, alleged that the NEA denied grants to these artists on political grounds, not on the grounds of artistic merit. And there has been some clear evidence of the fact that NEA chairman John Frohnmayer nixed these applications on political grounds, with the support of the President. That part of the case recently was settled with a $250,000 payment by the government; $50,000 of that amount went to compensate the artists for their denied grants and invasion of their privacy. Is it content or not? The other part of the Finley case, which is still pending, involves the decency clause. Notwithstanding then-chairman Frohnmayers assertion that he was not going to enforce the decency clause, a federal district court in California proceeded to consider whether the clause on its face was consistent with the First Amendment. In a strong and stirring reaffirmation of our basic principles of free expression, the court said: The right of artists to challenge conventional wisdom and values is a cornerstone of artistic and academic freedom Therefore, the court holds that government funding of the arts is subject to the constraints of the First Amendment. One can hope that the debate against content restrictions will be much more contained in the future. President Clinton came out strongly against content restrictions during his campaign. He has reaffirmed, in the current reauthorization cycle for the NEA, his opposition to content restrictions. Nevertheless, he is not asking Congress to delete the decency provision in the NEA statute, notwithstanding the fact that it has been declared unconstitutional by the District Court. This would have the obvious benefit of essentially mooting the decency debate. In an effort to scotch any further debate on content restrictions, to avoid a political battle, his people have said on the Hill that the decency restriction simply isnt a content restriction, as implemented by the NEA. What then is left on the constitutional front? Since the government is the patron, why cant it promulgate the rules as to who is going to get the money? After all, no artist is being denied the right to produce controversial or blasphemous art. One simply cant do it on a federal stipend. Art critic Hilton Kramer and his acolytes take that position. This issue is now focused on the federal appellate courts in the Finley appeal. It has the most profound implications to the artistic community. The central issue evolves from the Supreme Courts decision in Rust vs. Sullivan, which was the abortion gag rule case. There, the Supreme Court held in a tight five-to-four decision that it was constitutional for the government, as part of its program to support family planning clinics, to insist that doctors not advise women about an abortion option. The theory of that decision was that the government could define a federal program in any way that it wants; here, it had established a program that would provide adoption advice or birth advice, but excluded abortion advice from the scope of the program. .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 , .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .postImageUrl , .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 , .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641:hover , .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641:visited , .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641:active { border:0!important; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641:active , .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641 .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .ue3867ab7ca0070098d9f3788dc33e641:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Jeff Daniels: the Purple Rose of Chelsea is his baby EssayThe Supreme Court decision created havoc throughout the university, scientific, library, foundation, research, arts and humanities communities. It laid out a blueprint for those who want to use federal funding as a weapon to limit discussion of controversial issues. The government is speaking Thus, one could simply define a federal arts program as one that deals with non-blasphemous art, and determine that a proposal for a blasphemous picturesay, Christ with a needle in His armwas outside the program and thus nonfundable. Ones worst fears were realized in the Bush Administration. A senior Bush Justice Department official told Congress that when government funds are involved, the government itself is speaking and may constitutionally determine what is to be said. Then, in the decency challenge in the Finley case described above, the Bush Justice Department advanced the Rust decision as a rationale to deny federal funding. It argued that since the federal government was funding the art, under Rust it could deny grant applications on political grounds, on decency grounds or any other grounds. The District Court squarely rejected the Rust rationale. So far so good. However, the government last year filed a notice of appeal to take Judge Tashimas opinion up to the Court of Appeals. Enter President Clinton. Amazingly, the initial brief filed by the Clinton Justice Department echoed the rationale advanced by the Reagan and Bush Justice Departments. The brief, written by Bush holdovers, took the Rust rationale and applied it, without compromise, to arts funding. It said a straightforward application of the general rule in Rust means that the government can limit its subsidies to art projects that are not indecent. If the position set forth in the initial Clinton Justice Department brief is right, then Far Right opponents of the NEA will be able to argue for every conceivable restrictionrejecting arts funding on grounds that art is un-American, blasphemous, anti-Christian or rejects family values. A transition snafu This appears, we fervently hope, just a transition snafu. This first brief was filed at a time when there were virtually no new appointees serving in the Justice Department and, amazingly, those that were there apparently had no sensitivity to the explosiveness to this issuethe Clinton Administrations first statement on constitutional restrictions on the arts. Not surprisingly, the entire arts community, as well as all of the other communities that would be affected by this decision, erupted. An amicus brief with more than 60 signatoriesranging from National Public Radio and PBS, to the Museum of Modern Art, to Actors Equity, the Association of American Publishers and Theatre Communications Grouprecently urged the Court of Appeals to reject the Justice Department position. I believe that the Administration found itself genuinely abashed that it was taking a position in the litigation that seems totally inconsistent with its stated opposition to content restrictions. We have now seen the governments reply brief in Finley, and it has some good news and some disappointing news. First, we are disappointed that the government is continuing in its reply brief to press the position that the decency clause is constitutional. We think that this position is based on a misreading of congressional intent; the District Court was correct in evaluating the decency provision as a content standard and finding it unconstitutional. As far as the Justice Department position on Rust v. Sullivan, one can be pleased that the department has attempted to clarify some quite troubling statements in its initial brief. The department says that it wants to make clear that it is not calling for an extension of the Rust decision to apply in the arts funding context here. Given that position, the potentially contradictory statements in the earlier brief should now be inoperative. We take the Justice Department at its word that it is not intended to extend Rust to this situation and we trust that will be their clear position at oral argument in this matter. .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 , .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .postImageUrl , .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 , .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6:hover , .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6:visited , .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6:active { border:0!important; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6:active , .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6 .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .ufd0899f94061ee0b22a730f8eb9620b6:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: The climax of 'The Crucible' is the personal crisis faced by John Proctor EssayAlthough the governments reply brief claims that the arts community misunderstood the thrust of its earlier brief, in fact there was no misunderstanding. That prior brief quite clearly said that the Rust doctrine would constitutionally shelter administrative decisions to limit NEA grants only to projects that are decent. There was no mistake at all. In fact, the Justice Department appears to have beat a strategic, and proper, retreat. However, the Lord loves a repentant sinner, whatever the rationale.

The Glass Jar Essay Example

The Glass Jar Essay The Glass Jar, dedicated to Vivian Smith, is a narrative poem about a childs fear of the dark, and reflects, as many of her poems do, Gwen Harwoods knowledge and understanding of children. The poem can be read at a number of levels. At one level it is a story; at another it explores fears and taboos common to humankind, expressed in the language of myth or childhood fantasy; at a third level it addresses the struggle between good and evil from a Christian viewpoint, finally offering hope through Christs Resurrection, symbolised in the last stanza as the resurrected sun. The Christian perspective established early in the poem by words such as disciples, host, monstrance, bless, exorcize, and holy contributes to the poems unfolding spiritual meaning. The childs awareness of evil expressed in his fear, is a reminder of Adam and Eves loss of innocence, an act which condemned humankind to suffering and death. Gwen Harwood counterbalances this universal loss of innocence with the boys naivety, captured in the poems first striking image when the child attempts to trap some of the suns light in a glass jar he plans to use later as a night light to scare away the demons of his dreams. The poem is overlaid with Christian imagery symbolising the struggle between good and evil implicit in the boys attempts to defeat his demons. Apart from the religious overtones, the language of the poem is also reminiscent of mythical stories of dragons and devils of the type a young boy might be expected to have read or know about. Many modern psychologists, following Freud, have inferred parallels between well-known myths and legends and the symbols which occur in dreams representing powerful instinctive impulses. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed the concept of the collective unconscious, the inheritance of humanitys past experience which is embedded in the psyche of each individual. This collective memo ry consists of archetypes of primordial imaes which find their way into dreams, visions, motifs and the creative human imagination to be expressed in art, music, story and literature. Among primordial acts explored in literature are patricide and filial incest. The taboos on such behaviour as killing your father and marrying your mother are strong and deep, and common to many cultures. We will write a custom essay sample on The Glass Jar specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on The Glass Jar specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on The Glass Jar specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer The young protagonist of Gwen Harwoods poem is in a state of conflict because of jealousy and resentment of his father. The distressing, fantastical creatures of his nightmares, which express his most secret hate, are monsters and fiends, archetypes such as Jung recorded. His conscious mind is unaware of the origins of these demons; the sidelong violence of his unconscious is the source of the evil on which his fear feeds. It is his father whom he hates and fears; his father whom he sees as his rival for his mothers affection, his tormentor and the macabre fiddler of his nightmares. The boys dream becomes for the reader a mean of gaining further insight into the human psyche. The boy, however, is too young to learn the lessons his dreams can teach him. Even as a man he will have an imperfect knowledge of himself. The echo of the once upon a time opening a fairy tale in the first line of the poem, especially in the phrase one summers evening, is in keeping with the poems narrative style. The fantastic, poignant expectations the boy holds of capturing the suns light in the glass jar, continues the fairy tale quality. The use of the word soaked suggests how desperate the boy is to trap as much light as possible and hints at the degree of fear his demons generate in him. Words such as disciples and host introduce the Christian symbolism. The poet creates a pun on the word sun which in the poem is both a celestial body and a symbol for Christ, who as Gods son is the light or hope of the world in humanitys struggle against the powers of darkness. Through His passion or sufferings on the cross and resurrection from the dead, actions motivated by love, Christ defeats death and offers hope for humanity. For the boy, his glass jar full of light is his hope or weapon against the dark, but as the poem de velops we become aware that from a Christian viewpoint the boys hope is futile while he harbours his most secret hate. A further allusion to Christ is evident in the imagery of lines five-six of the first stanza. On the night before his arrest and crucifixion Christ went with his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. His disciples slept, the suns disciples cloaked in dream, while Christ experienced great anguish anticipating the physical suffering of his road to Calvary. Just as his disciples slept through his suffering on the previous night so their fear kept them from his crucifixion from his passion fled. Harwood uses light/dark symbolism in a traditional Christian way in this poem: light represents good, dark represents evil. In other poems the fading or dispersal of light can signal a movement into the past, as in The Violets when the onset of twilight triggers the memories of the poets childhood. In Alter Ego, lights lingering tones disperse to allow the poet to remember the first time she experienced the power of love. These journeys into reverie are learning experiences for the poet, part of the lifelong journey of self-discovery. The boy in this poem is at the beginning of his journey and cannot as yet decipher the symbolism of his dreams nor recognise his part in creating his own nightmares. Gwen Harwood is very interested in the artistic potential of memory and dream and uses both as a resource for her art. The two are closely linked as a dream becomes a remembered experience in the waking world. In The Glass Jar the boys dreams are graphic stories. Full of monstrous creatures with trident and vampire fang, and dramatic action, they: reached and came near to pierce him in the thicket of his fear. The boys dream, when he wakes and recalls it, becomes a new conscious memory. When he fails to gain comfort from either the glass jar or his mother, it becomes the source, later in the poem, of a more terrible nightmare with his father as the gruesome skeletal fiddler, a character borrowed from Saint-Saenss ballet, Dance Macabre, the Dance of Death. The metaphor of a wood as the setting of the boys nightmares is threaded throughout the poem, expressed variously as intricate wood, holy commonplace of field and flower, the thicket and the last clearing. The wood acts as an allusion to the Garden of Eden where the first conflict between good and evil was enacted yet it is also used to link the boys nightmares with his life by day. When he wakes from the monster-world of his dreams and finds no light in his jar he seeks comfort but must cross the last clearing of his parents bedroom to reach his mother, his comforter. He is barred from crossing the threshold to his parents bedroom by taboo, by fear and resentment of his father and by his childish inability to understand the nature of his parents love, especially its physical aspects which he interprets as gross violence done to his mother by his father. The reader is encouraged to empathise with the boys plight and his vulnerability, both of which are due to his lack of understanding of adult behaviour. Gwen Harwoods art makes her insights into the fears, pain and confusion of childhood pognantly realistic, with words such as trembling, grope and sobbing being partcularly evocative in the context of the boys experience. Children appear frequently in Gwen Harwoods poems and in each a distinctive facet of being is explored, illustrating her grasp of the complexity of youth. In The Glass Jar she shows her knowledge of the psychology of childhood through the boys naive faith in the power of his glass jar, his dreams and his jealousy of his father. In the two other poems set for study in which children appear, they are given a different treatment by the poet. In In the Park children are presented negatively as whining creatures who have sapped their mothers life, whereas the titian-haired schoolgirl in Prize-Giving is presented as intuitive and dynamic, possessing knowledge beyond her years and offering Eisenbart an enlightening image of himself. The boy, through his simple faith in the power of his glass jar, reveals his innocence; he thinks and acts as a child yet quests for an understanding of the world as would an adult. Even as an adult however, he will see through a glass darkly as the disciple Paul explains in Chapter Thirteen of his first Epistle to the Corinthians, suggesting that whatever self-knowledge he acquires will be incomplete, an imperfect reflection of his true self. As on Alter Ego, a knowledge of the whole self comes at the end of lifes journey. The implications of St Pauls Epistle are relevant to both poems. In stanza four of The Glass Jar, when the boy discovers the truth about his jar of light, his hope falls headlong from its eagle height. In his Epistle, Paul discusses the relative value of faith, hope and love and concludes that faith and hope are of little worth without love. As the boy is motivated by fear and hate his attempt to defeat his demons from a Christian perspective is doomed. In Alter Ego, because the poet accepts the path of love and pain in life, she seems assured of gaining complete self-knowledge, of meeting her other self face to face at the end of lifes journey. The boy has not consciously acknowledged the existence of another self and is unaware of the lessons his spirit self can teach him, so he must continue to struggle. He gropes for connections between his conscious and unconscious, between the darkness of his dreams and the light of his waking hours, between hatred for his father and love for his mother. It is only in sleep when his conscious mind is at rest, that the spirit self exerts its power. What it reveals is the boys inner darkness: His sidelong violence summoned fiends whose mosaic vision saw his heart entire. This is very different from Alter Ego where the adult poet consciously recognises that her spirit self: knows what I was, will be, and all I am The poem concludes on a hopeful note despite the boys anguish. The boy will outgrow his fears and in adulthood will grow to understand the many facets of his psyche. The boys final nightmare of perpetual dance ends with the sunrise, a symbol of hope, to a fresh morning. There is also a feeling of hope to be gleaned from the Christian symbolism of the final stanza. Christ, the resurrected sun, atoned through his life, death and resurrection for mans sins, and defeated death and evil, offering an alternative way to live and a promise of eternal joy to those who choose to follow his example. In her reference to the resurrected sun of the final stanza; whose long triumph through flower-brushed fields would fill nights gulfs and hungers the poet alludes to the hope Christ offers, nights gulfs and hungers symbolising lifes suffering and sturggles. The abandoned glass jar and crumpled scarf allude to the boys futile attempts to defeat his fear while the sun rises to wink and laugh, expressing his future hope. Homecoming An early opponent of the war in Vietname (in which Australia fought for years alongside the USA), Dawe responded to that bloody conflict with typical compassion. 1968 was the year of the Tet offensive (a major push by the Viet Cong) and the beginning of the end for Western intervention in the region. American troops were suffering about 1000 casualties a week. Our losses were proportionately almost as high and included a large number of conscripts. These were the young men compelled by the law of the time to join the armed services because their birth dates corresponded to certain numbers drawn by lottery. Dawe wrote this poem after viewing a photograph of a US tank returning base with dead and dying men draped over it. He had also read a report of how US troops were flown to Vietnam in transport planes, and how those same transport planes served to ferry home the latest corpses. This macabre shuttle service focused his mind on the chilling waste of life involved. Note the irony of the title. Homecoming suggests a celebration, something in which family and friends can share, a joyful reunion. Indeed, it is the term used by citizens of the US to describe the return of the warrior on. The typical heros homecoming would involve a parade down the street, with drums and marching girls, red white and blue banners waving and the whole citizenry out in force. There are similar rites of passage for the return of the Homecoming Queen, the favoured daughter who has gone away to college and who is now returning. All these are the typical associations with a homecoming. Now these same boys are coming home to a different kind of Homecoming, to families frozen in grief. Never was the sheer monotony, the boredom and soulless regimentation of army life so well captured in a poem. Marrying the idea of doing things by the book to the business of zipping up bodies into green plastic bags gives a chilling edge to the poem. Like some great sausage factory, some industrial corporation, neatly and without any feeling whatsoever, the army must dispose of that which it once clothed, fed and trained. The anonymous theyre occurs ten times in as many lines. It does not seem to matter who is living and who is dead. They who are dead could just as easily be doing the bringing, the picking up, the zipping, the tagging. Perhaps, yesterday, they were. All roles are interchaneable in this vast machinery of death. The poem is a lament, and like any song of lamentation, it requires rhythm, repetition, moments of urgency and quieter moments. Listen carefully to the repetition of the present continuous verbs in that memorable opening (brickingpickingbringing). The create a long continuous drone which seems to capture the reverberations of the big aircraft, as well as the grinding numbness of spirit such sights always induce. Contrast them with those quieter moments, as the relentless urgency of the poem eases for a millisecond; such as: theyre picking them up, those they can find, and bringing them home Those moments of pause renew our terror, giving us just time enough to ponder fresh horrors, before more are piled upon us. Like the soldiers themselves, we feel that a veritable flood of corpses is being unleashed. It is almost a relief when the nightmarish parade eases. Yet while the dead remain anonymous, Dawe gives us very specific details about everything related to them: the green plastic bags, the deep freeze lockers, the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut. But of the dead men themselves nothing. Their identity is reduced to various categories of hair colour and style. They are curly heads, kinky hairs, crew-cuts, balding non-coms. There is a kind of forensic taxonomy about this roll-call. Yet, paradoxically, it might be the only way a mother could idenity a son in death, his larrikin features shattered but still recognisable her carrot-topped boy. In ironic contrast to their silent baggage, the living and all they touch seem charged with energy. The poem moves at a blinding speed through the variety of chores which they must undertake. We can almost hear the drill sergeant shouting: Move em out, move em out! The business of war is too relentless, the momentum too great for anyone to be distracted by a moments grief. Even the noble jets, those behemoths of the sky, are whining like hounds. They sniff the night air. Its time to ho home! They have an energy which will not be impeded. Yet these silent corpses, frozen in their bodybags, have no one to speak for them. They are simply the obscene detritus of war. Not until they are released to their families will there be time for emotional release. The long flight home then begins. With great economy Dawe tracks the movements of the jet planes over the land, the steaming chow mein of the paddyfields, their shadows tracing the blue curve of Pacific and then the planes diverge, heading south, heading east, some to Australia, some to America. From the wider theatre of war, from the globes furthest reaches, the action now narrows perceptibly. Line fourteen declaims home, home, home in he moment of homecoming is at hand, the arrival of a dead son to those humble souls waiting in suburbia. In those last six lines, Dawe paints a stunning portrait of fear, grief and longing. The dogs on ancient verandahs howl at sunset for their lost masters. Like lone sentinels it is their muzzles which are raised in mute salute, rather than any jingoistic flag. Then on to the wide web of anonymous suburbs, where telegrams tremble like leaves from a wintering tree, an oblique reference to the suffering of their families in whose trembling hands the fateful messages are cradled. Finally, the last image of the spider grief which swing in his bitter geometry. Before such a extraordinary metaphor we are virtually mute. It simply refuses to budge, to yield to critical analysis. Yet we feel that we have been touched at the very limits of imagination, where words are almost out of reach. One critic has said that, once written, there is a kind of inevitability about such images which seem reached at the intersection of thought, feeling and language. Unless we consider it carefully, the last line might seem something of a let-down. But bringing them home takes us back to the first line and, by this deliberate contrivance, reminds us of the idea of homecoming. The interpolated now is what we are left with. Here they are now, presented to us and to their families. By their sheer physical presence they pronounce their fates to us. They are forever suspended in a kind of now time. Too late to have avoided their bitter fate, too early for a proper (living) homecoming, one that might salute their endeavours with joy and with dignity. Dawes opposition to the Vietnam war never gets caught up in the trivial politics of either side. It focuses instead, with overwhelming force, on the essential tragedy of all wars: the senseless death of young men, the terrible indifference to human life which is the central onscenity of war. This poem is justly one of his most famous.