| Goodbye England's rose May you ever grow in our hearts You were the grace that placed itself Where lives were torn apart You called out to our country And you whispered to those in pain Now you belong to heaven And the stars spell out your name chorus And it seems to me you lived your life Like a candle in the wind Never fading with the sunset When the rain set in And your footsteps will always fall here Along England's greenest hills Your candle's burned out long before Your legend ever will Loveliness we've lost These empty days without your smile This torch we'll always carry For our nation's golden child And even though we try The truth brings us to tears All our words cannot express The joy you brought us through the years [repeat chorus] Goodbye England's rose May you ever grow in our hearts You were the grace that placed itself Where lives were torn apart Goodbye England's rose From a country lost without your soul Who'll miss the wings of your compassion More than you'll ever know
5.3 Catholic Church bans pop music article Australia's Catholic church bans pop songs at funerals
MELBOURNE | Fri Sep 10, 2010 2:46am EDT Football club songs and pop or rock music have been banned from funerals in Catholic churches in Australia under new guidelines distributed this week to priests and funeral directors.
A funeral should not be a "celebration" of the deceased's life, Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart said in the rules, but a final sacred farewell. Celebrations of that life should be held at social occasions before or after the funeral, he said.
"The wishes of the deceased, family and friends should be taken into account ... but in planning the liturgy, the celebrant should moderate any tendency to turn the funeral into a secular celebration of the life of the deceased," the guidelines state.
"Secular items are never to be sung or played at a Catholic funeral, such as romantic ballads, pop or rock music, political songs, football club songs."
Some funeral directors, however, said the directive was insensitive to relatives' needs as many grieving families wanted to incorporate multimedia presentations, including photographs and video of the deceased person's life as well as music.
"Funerals have become a celebration of people's lives and there aren't many that don't include a DVD presentation," John Fowler, the general manager of Le Pine Funerals, told Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper.
"It really gives you a sense of the joy that this person has brought to the world."
Pop songs have become more common at funerals as new technology allows churches and funeral parlors to install sound systems and more people opt for services conducted by celebrants instead of religious ministers.
Centennial Park, a leading provider of cemetery, crematorium and memorial services in Australia, in 2008 compiled a list of the 10 most popular songs at Australian funerals.
The top song was Frank Sinatra's version of "My Way," followed by "Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong, "Time To Say Goodbye" by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, and "Unforgettable" by Nat "King" Cole.
Rounding out the top 10 were "The Wind Beneath My Wings" by Bette Midler, "Amazing Grace," "We'll Meet Again" by Vera Lynn, "Over the Rainbow" by Judy Garland, "Abide With Me" by Harry Secombe, and "Danny Boy."
The list of top 10 most popular unusual funeral songs included listed as Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust," AC/DC's "Highway to Hell, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" by Monty Python, and "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" from "The Wizard of Oz."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/09/10/us-funerals-idUSTRE6890WP20100910
5.4 Purpose of Poetry article
Beyond Grief and Grievance: The poetry of 9/11 and its aftermath.
By Philip Metres
(extracted from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/242580)
It was my second week as a newly-minted professor in the Midwest, September 11, 2001, and I hustled to complete a lecture on imagery when my wife called. All I could think was, “why is she calling me ten minutes before I have to teach?”—something about a plane crash something something New York—and then, “why do I need to know this before class?” I hung up, and returned to the poem before me, Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel .”
By the time I arrived in the classroom, after hearing the full extent of the morning’s events, I could barely get through the poem without breaking down in tears.
It wasn’t just the bag of ears that the Colonel pours across his opulent table. It’s the violence at the perimeters of vision—the filed nails of the daughter, the moon hanging on a cord, the house surrounded by a wall of broken bottles, the gratings on the window, even the rack of lamb.
The poem works not merely by intimating torture, but by decorating it so uncannily like homes in our own country. In the home of Forché’s Colonel, an American cop show plays on television, and a maid serves a delectable spread. Forché’s poem, in its raw confrontation, jolts us awake to the violence of privilege. But that’s what made it so difficult to teach on that day. What was 9/11 but the end of the fantasy of our separateness, our invulnerability?
The events of 9/11 occasioned a tremendous outpouring of poetry; people in New York taped poems on windows, wheatpasted them on posts, and shared them by hand. In Curtis Fox’s words, “poetry was suddenly everywhere in the city.” Outside the immediate radius of what became known as “ground zero,” aided by email, listserves, websites, and, later, blogs, thousands of people also shared poems they loved, and poems they had written. By February, 2002, over 25,000 poems written in response to 9/11 had been published on poems.com alone. Three years later, the number of poems there had more than doubled.
Often invisible in American culture, poetry suddenly became relevant, even—and perhaps dangerously—useful. People turned to poems when other forms failed to give shape to their feelings. Some of these poems, certainly, employed the language of faith, a faith that has often been mobilized as a weapon of grievance. Some were desperately angry, in the way Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” promises to put a “boot in the ass” of those that “messed” with the U.S. of A. In Cleveland, I recall hearing some rather salty Osama limericks involving his mama.
Of course, poems that take on subjects as public and iconic as the attacks of September 11th risk not only devolving into cliché and hysterical jingoism, but also, even when most well-meaning, perpetuating the violence of terror, and the violence of grievance and revenge, as mass media did by endlessly replaying images of the planes exploding into the World Trade Center towers. Likewise, when we read enough 9/11 poems, we become awash in falling people, planes described as birds, flaming towers of Babel, ash and angels, angels and ash. The mythic nature of this attack, this disaster—echoing everything from the tower of Babel to the fall of Icarus—is undeniable, and the acts of heroism and the brute loss of so many makes it difficult to find adequate words, even for our most accomplished poets.
In a riposte to John Lundberg’s 2010 essay on the Huffington Post, “Remembering 9/11 Through Poetry,” one commenter acidly posted: “isn’t 9/11 bad enough without adding poetry to it?” The commenter known as “Zymos” may just be a poetry-hater, but he also has a point, made more articulately by Theodor Adorno, that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Adorno reflects on the dangers of art to render traumatic events too easily understandable, too easily commodifiable. In his essay, “Commitment,” Adorno extends his original critique, saying that by turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them….The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite. The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art which tried to evade them could confront the claims of justice.
But we cannot be silent. So between the Scylla of cliché and the Charybdis of exploitation, poetry moves. Martín Espada’s “Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 ,” for example, offers a globalist ode to the workers on the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center who perished in the attacks. By focusing on people often unnoticed, sometimes undocumented, and occasionally disparaged, Espada celebrates the diverse gathering of humanity that the American project has enabled, and that the attacks threatened to separate, in the rhetoric of security and the ideology of fear.
Read ‘Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100’ by Martin Espada in your 9/11 Poetry Pack (see Appendices 5.5)
The poem’s concluding lines brings the victims of war—from the 9/11 victims to the victims of war in Afghanistan—into conversation again. Perhaps the best response to Adorno’s legitimate concerns is that “music is all we have.”
Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska also manages to avoid the troubling possibility of art’s exploitation for easy (and false) transcendence, in her poem “Photograph from September 11.
Read ‘Photograph from September 11’ by Wislawa Szmborska in your 9/11 Poetry Pack.
Szymborska takes the photograph of the so-called “falling man” and uses it as a monument to our elegiac desire to freeze the beloved in the moments before death. By not adding a last line and by not giving the poem its expected (and easy) closure, Szymborska keeps the work open, the wound fresh.
Not all worthwhile 9/11 poetry reflected such ambiguity, though. It would be strange to talk about poetry and 9/11 and not mention Amiri Baraka’s scandal-making and splenetic “Somebody Blew Up America,” published in 2002. At the time, Baraka held the post of New Jersey’s poet laureate, and his poem caused an outcry principally for perpetuating an Internet myth that 4000 Israelis were told to stay home from work at the Twin Towers on September 11, and secondarily for its anti-imperialist rant against the United States and figures of the Bush Administration. His subsequent defense of the poem, an essay called “I Will Not ‘Apologize,’ I Will Not ‘Resign,’” did not do the work any favors; rather than arguing that the poem is the dramatized utterance of a suppressed but necessary point of view—that of the anti-imperialist scourge—Baraka asserts his absolute identification with the poem’s rhetoric.
The poem may be smarter than the poet’s argument on its behalf. Emerging from an event which has ignited as many conspiracy theories as JFK’s assassination, “Somebody Blew Up America” enacts the intoxification of conspiracy-theorizing itself. Conspiracy theory, spastic groping after fact and reason, comes out of the fantasy of absolute governmental power. While the poem’s catalogue of imperial atrocity is mostly documentable (with the glaring exception being Israeli and American administration complicity in the attacks), the desire to place all the blame on a singular “Somebody” dramatizes the weakness of a totalizing critique of empire.
Read ‘Somebody Blew Up America’ by Amiri Baraka in your 9/11 Poetry Pack.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 compelled me to rethink everything I thought I knew, and made me want to learn more, to read outside whatever borders I had created for myself. Not to be more American, but to be a better citizen, a better denizen of the planet. To go global and be local, to go ancient and be modern, to question all certainties and embrace what I did not know, to read Rumi and Isaiah, Rushdie and Roy and even Al-Qaeda, to listen to Springsteen and Kulthum, to refuse the elixir of fundamentalisms, to translate and be translated again by what I could not yet understand. To tattoo "Oye" on my body. To listen.
5.5 Three Different 9/11 Poems
‘Alabanza’ by Martín Espada
Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.
‘Photograph from September 11’ by Wislawa Szmborska
They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.
The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.
Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.
There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.
They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.
I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.
They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.
The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.
Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.
There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.
They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.
I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line
The Falling Man
‘Somebody Blew Up America’ by Amiri Baraka
(All thinking people
oppose terrorism
both domestic
& international…
But one should not
be used
To cover the other)
They say its some terrorist, some barbaric A Rab, in Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring
It wasn't
the gonorrhea in costume
the white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases
They say (who say? Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks
Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation
Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa
Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil
Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble
Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest
Who define art
Who define science
Who made the bombs
Who made the guns
Who bought the slaves, who sold them
Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane
Who/ Who / Who
Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese
Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers
Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army
Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker
Who/ Who/ Who
Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war
Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger
Who own this city
Who own the air
Who own the water
Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth
Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime
Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos
Who/Who/Who
Who own the ocean
Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio
Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners
Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws
Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying
WHO/ WHO/ WHOWHO/
Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who decide
Jesus get crucified
Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide
Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival
Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner
Who/Who/Who
Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie
Who/ Who
Who found Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego
Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion
Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere
Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?
Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later
Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,
Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane , Betty Shabazz, Princess Margaret, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby
Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia,Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton
Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
MedgarEvers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed
Who put a price on Lenin's head
Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars
WHO/WHO
Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured , assassinated, vanished
Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,
Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"
Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek
who WHO W H O
Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New
Frontier, The Great Society,
Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere
Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson, who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey, The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten
Who set the Reichstag Fire
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?
Who,Who, Who
explosion of Owl the newspaper say
the devil face cd be seen Who WHO Who WHO
Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror
violence, and hunger and poverty.
Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful
Who you know ever
Seen God?
But everybody seen
The Devil
Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog
Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO who who
Whoooo and Whoooooooooooooooo
Section Three - Poetry and War.
Rationale
Like the other units within the sequence this unit aims to use the lens of contemporary culture and song lyrics to engage students in the learning and appreciation of poetry. This series of five lessons focuses upon the theme of ‘War’. Broadly speaking each lesson consists of a ‘conventional’ poem which is set alongside a popular song which raises similar themes. Haugh (2002) writes that whilst poetry is often perceived by students and teachers alike as a ‘difficult’ area to teach it actually enjoys the benefit of being the written form with which teenagers can potentially most easily identify. Song lyrics and genres such as Hip Hop frequently employ poetic language and, more importantly, whilst few teenagers could claim to have attempted writing a novel, a large number will have either attempted song writing (or at least be capable of reciting song lyrics at length). It is upon this notion of poetic language within music/song lyrics that this unit is focused. The contention is that by drawing students’ attention to the poetic nature of song lyrics it will both engage students and serve as a scaffold into an appreciation of more ‘conventional’ poetry. Whilst each of the five lessons sets a song lyric alongside a poem, each lesson has a different focus and accompanying set of activities. The degree of self-determination/self-directed learning within each activity also accommodates varying levels of skill and literacy within the student body.
All lessons are conceived and formulated with VELS standards in mind, incorporating elements of reading, writing and discussion. Given the subjective, creative nature of both the subject matter and related activities it is recommended that this unit be assessed formatively/PGO, based on both participation and completion of the assigned tasks.
( Haugh, K et al. The English Journal, Vol. 91, No. 3, Teaching and Writing Poetry (Jan., 2002),
pp. 25-31 National Council of Teachers of English.)
Aims
- To engage students in an active appreciation of poetry and poetic language.
- Students to successfully identify and understand key forms and mechanics of poetry.
- Students to successfully employ these mechanics in creating poetry of their own.
- Students to successfully utilise ICT and research skills.
- Students to practice group work, presentation, reading and listening skills
Introduction
War and conflict have been recurrent themes in both music and ‘conventional’ poetry for thousands of years. Historically these accounts usually glorified war and the heroic deeds and sacrifices made by soldiers. The advent of mechanised warfare at around the time of the First World War saw a definite change of attitude within popular culture which continues into the modern era. Whilst politicians, the media and religious groups may at various times espouse the ‘necessity’ of a war, in the West at least the bulk of both poetry and music is critical of it.
1/Activity One: “War down the Ages”. 
This initial lesson is designed to introduce some traditional ‘heroic’ war poetry and focus upon the kinds of emotions and sentiments that such works draw upon. Both Blake and Tennyson write poetry in a ‘classic’ style and whilst their themes are dated for a modern readership their work provides a strong basis for discussion of terms such as metaphor, meter, form and repetition. Tennyson is also interesting in the sense that whilst he acknowledges the charge was a ‘blunder’ and in some ways futile, he nevertheless glorifies the soldiers heroism and sacrifice. Blake’s famous poem “Jerusalem” evokes not only patriotism and love of country but also equates these sentiments to religious righteousness. The Elvis Costello hit“Oliver’s Army” provides an interesting contrast to these poems. Taking its title from Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) , thematically it describes the lot of both conscripted and professional soldiers through British history. Drawn largely from poor working class backgrounds the songs portraying them as pawns in a political game. When subjected to analysis as a poem Costello’s song contains many examples of language working at a ‘poetic’ level.
Whilst accommodating all the aims for the unit overall, the activity in this particular lesson places emphasis upon the recognition, analysis and discussion of poetic language.
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