Sheep, lambs may not safely

On a day when I’d thought to remember Veteran’s Day, this early morning’s adventure instead was to open the email from Smithsonian, admire a photograph of sheep grazing in a meadow or pasture near Goethe’s garden house, 


explore the man a bit, couple poems and English übersetzt (!) 

Aug, mein Aug, was sinkst du nieder?
Goldne Träume, kommt ihr wieder?
Weg, du Traum! So gold du bist:
Hier auch Lieb und Leben ist.
Hier auch Lieb und Leben ist.

referring to his erste große Liebe, arguments about how to pronounce his name (not Americanized gerta, but goo-ta with lips pursed while thinking “r” but not pronouncing “r”), personal history and religious views (“not anti-Christian, not un-Christian, but decidedly non-Christian”), and his views on passionate nationalism:

How could I write songs of hatred when I felt no hate? And, between ourselves, I never hated the French, although I thanked God when we were rid of them. How could I, to whom the only significant things are civilization [Kultur] and barbarism, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated in the world, and to which I owe a great part of my own culture? In any case this business of hatred between nations is a curious thing. You will always find it more powerful and barbarous on the lowest levels of civilization. But there exists a level at which it wholly disappears, and where one stands, so to speak, above the nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people as though it were one's own. 

though surely, hopefully, he would have felt hate, and hated, during Germany’s period 1933 to 1945. His poem (auf dem See) I liked, especially that stanza, and most especially his observation that fierce nationalism is more powerful and barbarous on the lowest levels of civilization. 

And when religion and nationalism mix, the lowest level of civilization is not only who we fight in the middle-east and in New York, Vegas and who's next, but in our own Christian Right whom I’ve occasionally symbolized ominously as XnRt. 

Without self-judgment, condemnation, or uneven pride, I am what I am, American, white, male, a veteran, aging and aged, beyond reeducating from what I am into what I should be. 

 What else comes to mind. Sheep, "Schafe ..." Bach's aria for soprano with two recorders and continuo, "Sheep may safely graze" in a world where sheep no longer may and probably never again. Isaiah 11:6 "the wolf shall live with the lamb." John's "behold, the Lamb of God" (1:29, 36) linked to the day of preparation, slaughter of the lambs (19:14, 31). Perhaps finally, a commendation, "a sheep of thine own flock, a lamb of thine own fold, ..."