Lay down candles

Photo: A boy lights candles on a street, for the victims of recent shelling in the Shiite neighborhood of Karradah, Baghdad, late Monday, May 28, 2007.

Many occupants of Karradah have been killed in the last week by mortal shells attacks.

(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

I posted this on my Faces of Grief blog, but I like this photo so much I posted it here also.

This is a beautiful photo, and this is something that I do about twice a year - a public display of candles to honor and remember the innocents killed in war. Here in my home town, we will be doing this in August to remember the victims of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And on September 19th, we will be doing this to mark four and a half years of US occupation of Iraq.

I started lighting candles as a form of prayer and protest and remembrance just before the start of the war and invasion of Iraq. We generally used candle luminaries - that is tea candles in sand inside a paper bag. We need to put them inside paper bags so the wind won't blow them out right away. Sometimes we just hold candles inside a glass jar in our hands. One time, we had a sight rain start up during the vigil, and that made the paper bags soggy, and then they fell over and the candle lit the bag on fire. That was kinda cool to watch.

When this war was being planned and promoted, I pulled out an old song from my teenage years, "Lay down candles (in the rain)". For some reason, that song was popular with me and my friends, even though we never protested for peace during the years of the war on Vietnam. We were too young. But we did do a rebellion period, which included doing some things that was not good for our lungs. I remember thinking that we got the drugs, sex and rock-n-roll - but not the protests or large music events.

I never imagined that 30 years later the protests and organizing would be a major part of my life. And for this spell of working against the US government and their plans of evil, we have no drugs, sex or rock-n-roll to accompany us. Maybe the younger protesters do, but my generation does not.

Here's some of the words to "Lay Down Candles (in the rain)"

Lay down, lay down, lay it all down
Let your white birds smile up
At the ones who stand and frown

We were so close, there was no room
We bled inside each others wounds
We all had caught the same disease
And we all sang the songs of peace

So raise the candles high, 'cause if you don't
We could stay black against the night
Oh raise them higher again and if you do
We could stay dry against the rain

Some came to sing, some came to pray
Some came to keep the dark away

Well, I am off to family visits (my niece is graduating from high school!) and then back to DC for lobbying, rallies and protests. There will be no updates until Monday.