* Playing in the "Worm Dirt"

The new controversy surrounding the death of soldier/former NFL player Pat Tillman in Afghanistan regards his & his family's purported (lack of) "faith." Thus an Army lieutenant colonel has attacked the Tillmans' subsequent vocal concerns about the military's handling of Pat's death as perhaps based on their lack of religious belief, and therefore lack of solace & closure: "Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt." [—ugh, punctuation & grammar—] In sum, the family can't get over his death, presumably, without the crutch of faith that he is now a good Christian soul in Heaven.

As for myself, I find great solace in the fact that I'll be "worm dirt" some day in the future, mingling my atoms with the rest of the planet & cosmos—first, dirt and "worm food"; then worm; now—robin? (And so, then, with more real wings than those of Christian angels?!) Plus, I'll be free of all this bogus human ideology that must deny its own DIRT-filled existence. Even the Good Gray Poet may have believed something very similar a good century and a half ago (Quot. of the Day):

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.
    --Walt Whitman

Ditto, Pat Tillman, and requiescat. . . . (Yes, Whitman always claimed to be both the poet of the "body" and the "soul," and his emphasis on the "soul" became greater, the older he got. But by far his best poetry was that of the "body" and of the "earth"—that is, of "worm dirt.")