We seem to have fallen into a black hole.

Quote of the Day

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, 

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Remember . . .

* 9 Simple Ways You Can Help Veterans *

* Ways To Give Back To Veterans *

* 10 Ways To Support and Honor Veterans *

* Here's How You Can Help Homeless Vets This Veteran's Day *

* Charity Navigator: Your Guide To Intelligent Giving / Support Veterans and Active Duty Servicemembers *

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

- John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“The breath goes now," and some say, “No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

There’s Only One Natural Death, and Even That’s Bedcide:

            For the post-mortem amusement of Richard Brigantine

- Edward Dorn

A B H O R E N C E S
November 10, 1984

Death by over-seasoning: Herbicide

Death by annoyance: Pesticide

Death by suffocation: Carbon monoxide

Death by burning: Firecide

Death by falling: Cliffcide

Death by hiking: Trailcide

Death by camping: Campcide

Death by drowning:       Rivercide

                                  Lakecide

                                  Oceancide

Death from puking: Curbcide

Death from boredom: Hearthcide

Death at the hands of the medical profession: Dockcide

Death from an overnight stay: Inncide

Death by suprise: Backcide

Death by blow to the head: Upcide

Death from delirious voting: Rightcide

Death from hounding: Leftcide

Death through war: Theircide & Ourcide

Death by penalty: Offcide

Death following a decision: Decide

from: Abhorrences, Copyright 1980.

Quote of the Day

It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. …. 

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity …. 

They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

- Vice President Henry A. Wallace, 

“The Danger of American Fascism,” April 1944

Election Day

- J. D. McClatchy

The older couples had voted just after dawn,
And by noon the exit polls are underway.
Some talking head opines in San Jose.
My poster is mute and silent on the lawn.

“As the wind blows, so the flag will wave,”
Says a cynic who is nevertheless waiting in line.
The woman in front of him has been assigned
The nearest booth where she plans, again, to save

The Republic from itself — the drama played out
In this miniature theater, with its curtain and cast.
Today will be a performance of the past,
Its fortunes and flaws, its certainty and doubt.

The pencil has no eraser. She makes her choice,
Determined but still uncertain how it will end,
As the Founders were as well who thought to lend
So much importance to each small impassioned voice.

But will the cynic’s vote now cancel hers?
She stays behind to watch him enter the booth.
(In our democracy, we think “the truth”
Is what everyone, regardless, secretly prefers.)

She won’t know anything but threats and trends
Until, again in the dark, but midnight’s now,
She can sense what hope the numbers will allow,
And what you get when you smear or overspend.

She will sit and stare at charts on CNN.
(But aren’t we redeemed by what they cannot show?
The struggle in each restless heart to know
The terms on which the nation’s fate depends.)

She will think how, at last, millions have spoken as one,
That freedom requires an open mind and hand,
And the strength to be forgiven and understand,
And that tomorrow morning it has all just begun.


from: page A35 of the Nov. 4, 2008 New York Times.

VOTE! vote! VOTE! vote! VOTE! vote! VOTE!

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

My Mother Goes to Vote

- Judith Harris

We walked five blocks

to the elementary school,

my mother’s high heels

crunching through playground gravel.

We entered through a side door.

Down the long corridor,

decorated with Halloween masks,

health department safety posters—

we followed the arrows

to the third grade classroom.

My mother stepped alone

into the booth, pulling the curtain behind her.

I could see only the backs of her

calves in crinkled nylons.

A partial vanishing, then reappearing

pocketbook crooked on her elbow,

our mayor’s button pinned to her lapel.

Even then I could see—to choose

is to follow what has already

been decided.

We marched back out

finding a new way back down streets

named for flowers

and accomplished men.

I said their names out loud, as we found

our way home, to the cramped house,

the devoted porch light left on,

the customary meatloaf.

I remember, in the classroom converted

into a voting place—

there were two mothers, conversing,

squeezed into the children’s desk chairs.

from: Night Garden, Copyright 2013.

It's A Garden Party! -

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and was then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

If anyone would like to share their own gardening adventures with me

- large or small, inside or out -

I would love to see them.

Just leave a link to your post in the comments.

~

How much longer will the garden stand fast against the coming winter?

The rain started early this year, which is a good thing, but the cold, wet winter that is forecast for this year could bring its own difficulties.

I'm happy to enjoy the continuing blooms as long as they last and deal any other issues as they make themselves known.

The Fact of the Garden

- Minnie Bruce Pratt

 

With this rain I am satisfied we will be together

in the spring. Seeds of water on my window glass,

transparent sprouts and rootlets. In your backyard

steady rain through the heavy dirt we dug in,

our shovels excavating some history of the tiny garden.

Our blades cut through the design of a previous digger:

rotting boards, rocks, earthworms big as young snakes;

a tarnished spoon, pink champagne foil from a party;

a palmful of blue feathers from a dead jay.

We dug and planted. We intend to have a history here

behind this rented house. Despite the owner there is a secret

between us and the ground. In the wet dirt, our fleshy bulbs

and the pink cloves of garlic are making nests of roots.

The fact of the garden has satisfied me all morning:

that we worked side by side, your name round

when I spoke it: that my fingers worked in the dirt like rain,

the ground like a made bed with its mulch of leaves,

orderly, full of possibilities, acts of love

not yet performed.

Now the water’s slap on my window

has made me think of something else, suddenly,

what I don’t want to, the way I wake up in the night,

think I’ve heard a gun shot.

The memory, news story

you told me a week ago: the farmers south,

far south, El Salvador, afraid to go into their fields.

What does their dirt look like? I don’t know.

Instead I see that some thing is being planted:

U.S. soldiers watching as others bury a dead

hand, arm, head, torso.

To be afraid

to put your hand into the dirt. To be afraid to go

look at your ground: that it has been cut like skin,

will bulge out like cut muscle: that on a fair day

there will be subterranean thunder, then a loud, continuous

hiss of blood.

I wish I could see only the flowering

bulbs voluptuous in the spring.

But what is planted is

what comes. In the fall, plant stones: in the winter,

the ground gapes with stones like teeth.

I hold to the plan we thought of: small: full of

possibilities against despair:

us handing out

sheets of paper, thousands, the list of crimes:

sharp thin papers delving up something in people

in parking lots, shopping malls.

What will come of this?

Perhaps people to stand with us outside the buildings,

to say again: Not in my name. Words adamant as rock,

and actions, here, in the coldest months, before

soldiers move again in the fields to the south.

from: The Dirt She Ate: New and Selected Poems, Copyright 2003. 

 

I'm Working On This One . . .

Inspiring Wonder . . . Bettering the World

Quote of the Day

I try to keep things positive on this blog, but this election has me thinking that maybe Jean-Paul Sartre was right.

L'enfer, c'est les autres.

Hell is other people.

Great Literature Is Always In Style

Kilt-O-Ween Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

#670 (Ms Dickinson Always Chose Such Catchy Titles.)

- Emily Dickinson

One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted -
One need not be a House -
The Brain has Corridors - surpassing
Material Place -

Far safer, of a Midnight Meeting
External Ghost
Than its interior Confronting -
That Cooler Host.

Far Safer, through an Abbey gallop,
The Stones a'chase -
Than Unarmed, one's a'self encounter -
In lonesome Place -

Ourself behind ourself, concealed -
Should startle most -
Assassin hid in our Apartment
Be Horror's least.

The Body - borrows a Revolver -
He bolts the Door -
O'erlooking a superior spectre -
Or More -

Sonnet VII

- John Keats

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,—
Nature’s observatory—whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

{Photo Ivan Vasiliev}

Have You Ever Wondered What Goes On In Your Fridge When the Lights Are Off?

Quote of the Day

The quality of a leader is reflected in the standards they set for themselves.

- Ray Kroc

Talisman

- Marianne Moore


Under a splintered mast,
torn from ship and cast
              near her hull,
a stumbling shepherd found
embedded in the ground,
              a sea-gull
of lapis lazuli,
a scarab of the sea,
            with wings spread—
curling its coral feet,
parting its beak to greet
            men long dead.

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

Serenity

- Edward Rowland Sill

Brook,
Be still,—be still!
Midnight’s arch is broken
In thy ceaseless ripples.
Dark and cold below them
Runs the troubled water,—
Only on its bosom,
Shimmering and trembling,
Doth the glinted star-shine
                  Sparkle and cease.
                  Life,
Be still,—be still!
Boundless truth is shattered
On thy hurrying current.
Rest, with face uplifted,
Calm, serenely quiet;
Drink the deathless beauty—
Thrills of love and wonder
Sinking, shining, star-like;
Till the mirrored heaven
Hollow down within thee
Holy deeps unfathomed,
Where far thoughts go floating,
And low voices wander
              Whispering peace.

It's A Garden Party! - Winter & Roses

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and was then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

If anyone would like to share their own gardening adventures with me

- large or small, inside or out -

I would love to see them.

Just leave a link to your post in the comments.

~

We had rain several days this week and everything in the garden seems happy about it. Well, as happy as you can be when dying or going dormant.

The chickens are gone.

They had found a cozy spot deep under the Cape Honeysuckle and settled in to escape the rain. (Here's a lousy picture of them heading under.) I thought no more about them until two days later when I realized that I didn't hear them anymore.

Someone must have decided they wanted to go into business & picked up a ready made inventory. We have a lot of people raising chickens around here so I'm sure they found a nice home.

The Roses are still blooming. Just a few blossoms here and there, but they're plugging along.

O, Gather Me the Rose
- William Ernest Henley

O, gather me the rose, the rose,
While yet in flower we find it,
For summer smiles, but summer goes,
And winter waits behind it!

For with the dream foregone, foregone,
The deed forborne for ever,
The worm, regret, will canker on,
And time will turn him never.

So well it were to love, my love,
And cheat of any laughter
The death beneath us and above,
The dark before and after.

The myrtle and the rose, the rose,
The sunshine and the swallow,
The dream that comes, the wish that goes,
The memories that follow!

Friday Snow

- Reginald Gibbons

Something needs to be done—like dragging a big black plastic sack through the upstairs rooms, emptying into it each waste basket, the trash of three lives for a week or so. I am careful and slow about it, so that this little chore will banish the big ones. But I leave the bag lying on the floor and I go into my daughter’s bedroom, into the north morning light from her windows, and while this minute she is at school counting or spelling a first useful word I sit down on her unmade bed and I look out the windows at nothing for a while, the unmoving buildings—houses and a church—in the cold street.
       Across it a dark young man is coming slowly down the white sidewalk with a snowshovel over his shoulder. He’s wearing a light coat, there’s a plastic showercap under his dirty navy blue knit hat, and at a house where the walk hasn’t been cleared he climbs the steps and rings the doorbell and stands waiting, squinting sideways at the wind. Then he half wakes and he says a few words I can’t hear to the storm door that doesn’t open, and he nods his head with the kindly farewell that is a habit he wears as disguise, and he goes back down the steps and on to the next house. All of this in pantomime, the way I see it through windows closed against winter and the faint sounds of winter.
       My daughter’s cross-eyed piggy bank is also staring out blankly, and in its belly are four dollar bills that came one at a time from her grandmother and which tomorrow she will pull out of the corked mouthhole. (It’s not like the piggy banks you have to fill before you empty them because to empty them you have to smash them.) Tomorrow she will buy a perfect piece of small furniture for her warm well-lit dollhouse where no one is tired or weak and the wind can’t get in.
       Sitting on her bed, looking out, I didn’t see a bundled-up lame child out of school and even turned out of the house for a while, or a blind woman with burns or a sick bald veteran—people who might have walked past stoop-shouldered with what’s happened and will keep happening to them. So much limping is not from physical pain—the pain is gone now, but the leg’s still crooked. The piggy bank and I see only the able young man whose straight back nobody needs.
       When he finally gets past where I can see him, it feels as if a kind of music has stopped, and it’s more completely quiet than it was, an emptiness more than a stillness, and I get up from the rumpled bed and I smooth the covers, slowly and carefully, and I look around the room for something to pick up or straighten, and I take a wadded dollar bill from my pocket and put it into the pig and I walk out.

Reginald Gibbons, “Friday Snow” from Saints (New York: Persea Books, 1986). Copyright © 1986 by Reginald Gibbons. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

 

from: Saints. Copyright 1986.

Thursday

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

And if I loved you Wednesday,

Well, what is that to you?

I do not love you Thursday—

So much is true.

And why you come complaining

Is more than I can see.

I loved you Wednesday,—yes—but what

Is that to me?

Quote of the Day

The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.

- John Wooden

Haiku Ambulance

A piece of green pepper
       fell
off the wooden salad bowl:

       so what?

- Richard Brautigan

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

North Wind

- Lola Ridge

I love you, malcontent
Male wind -
Shaking the pollen from a flower
Or hurling the sea backward from the grinning sand.
Blow on and over my dreams. . .
Scatter my sick dreams. . .
Throw your lusty arms about me. . .
Envelop all my hot body. . .
Carry me to pine forests -
Great, rough-bearded forests. . .
Bring me to stark plains and steppes. . .
I would have the North to-night -
The cold, enduring North.
And if we should meet the Snow,
Whirling in spirals,
And he should blind my eyes. . .
Ally, you will defend me -
You will hold me close,
Blowing on my eyelids.

It's A Garden Party! - In the Jurassic!

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and was then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

If anyone would like to share their own gardening adventures with me

- large or small, inside or out -

I would love to see them.

Just leave a link to your post in the comments.

~

Snow Drops are on their way!

I took some trash out to the can yesterday and saw an empty Crispy Kreme box on the ground.

I also saw something else.

I may have mentioned the chicken tearing up my garden. Well, here she is . . . along with a surprise. I only count ten in this picture, but there are eleven.

Here she is in front of the Cape Honeysuckle. What you can't see is that it's raining and and she is protecting her babies beneath her.

Here they are running in terror as I try to get a decent picture of them.

Why do I care about the prehistoric monsters who are tearing up my garden? I don't know.

All right. Yes. They're cute and I can't help it.

There. Are you happy now?

 And look!
The California Poppies are still hanging on.

Although it was afternoon when the picture was taken, this poppy is still sleeping. Since it was overcast and raining it felt no need to get up. I often feel the same way.

Woman Feeding Chickens

- Roy Scheele

Her hand is at the feedbag at her waist,

sunk to the wrist in the rustling grain

that nuzzles her fingertips when laced

around a sifting handful. It’s like rain,

like cupping water in your hand, she thinks,

the cracks between the fingers like a sieve,

except that less escapes you through the chinks

when handling grain. She likes to feel it give

beneath her hand’s slow plummet, and the smell,

so rich a fragrance she has never quite

got used to it, under the seeming spell

of the charm of the commonplace. The white

hens bunch and strut, heads cocked, with tilted eyes,

till her hand sweeps out and the small grain flies.

from: A Far Allegiance, Copyright 2010.

Burlesque

- Amaud Jamaul Johnson

 

Watch the fire undress him,

how flame fingers each button,

rolls back his collar, unzips him

without sweet talk or mystery.

See how the skin begins to gather

at his ankles, how it slips into

the embers, how it shimmers

beneath him, unshapen, iridescent

as candlelight on a dark negligee.

Come, look at him, at all his goods,

how his whole body becomes song,

an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope.

Listen as he lets loose an opus,

night’s national anthem, the tune

you can’t name, but can’t stop humming.

There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.

from: Red Summer, Copyright 2006. 

 

Bharatanatyam Dancer

- Sudeep Sen
                  for Leela Samson

Spaces in the electric air divide themselves

    in circular rhythms, as the slender

grace of your arms and bell-tied ankles

 describe a geometric topography, real, cosmic,

 one that once reverberated continually in

a prescribed courtyard of an ancient temple

in South India. As your eyelids flit and flirt, and

    match the subtle abhinaya in a flutter

of eye-lashes, the pupils create an

 unusual focus, a sight only ciliary muscles

 blessed and cloaked in celestial kaajal

could possibly enact.

The raw brightness of kanjeevaram silk, of

    your breath, and the nobility of antique silver

adorns you and your dance, reminding us of

 the treasure chest that is only

 half-exposed, disclosed just enough, barely —

for art in its purest form never reveals all.

Even after the arc-lights have long faded,

    the audience, now invisible, have stayed over.

Here, I can still see your pirouettes, frozen

 as time-lapse exposures, feel

 the murmuring shadow of an accompanist’s

intricate raag in this theatre of darkness,

a darkness where oblique memories of my

    quiet Kalakshetra days filter,

matching your very own of another time,

 where darkness itself is sleeping light,

 light that merges, reshapes, and ignites,

dancing delicately in the half-light.

But it is this sacred darkness that endures,

    melting light with desire, desire that simmers

and sparks the radiance of your

 quiet femininity, as the female dancer

 now illuminates everything visible: clear,

poetic, passionate, and ice-pure.

Copyright 2014.

Quote of the Day

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.

    -Harold Kushner

I'm Trying Out A New Look. What Do You Think?

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

Viewers may think that they can process it all

- Stephanie Gray

but they are fooling themselves, if there’s a window open you might have a chance, if you hadn’t all gone to Holy Name, if the world didn’t change, if you only bent the laws of physics so much, if the tides weren’t so strong on the Hudson, if you didn’t have to go, if it wasn’t a dream you still believed in, if that different kind of memory didn’t take hold, if your muscle memory didn’t steady you, if you didn’t have orders you couldn’t ship, if you didn’t see what you saw, if the crawl wasn’t always hungry, if there weren’t celebrities in every sphere, if you didn’t know all the criminals in the neighborhood, if nothing ever happened here, if it wasn’t a country club, if there wasn’t magic in actuality, if you didn’t dislocate the phrase, if you didn’t grind the blue sky, if it hadn’t been a downward trajectory, if the shadow didn’t undo itself, if you all weren’t all on break, if everyone didn’t shut down, if Canada wasn’t in the escape plans, if the future wasn’t sparkling with nostalgia

from: A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction, Copyright 2015.

It's A Garden Party!

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and was then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

If anyone would like to share their own gardening adventures with me

- large or small, inside or out -

I would love to see them.

Just leave a link to your post in the comments.

~

This Bud's for you!

Experts tell us that a combination of drought, fires, and changing weather patterns may make this winter a rough one for us this year. We are due for a wet fall/winter/spring, and may end up with serious flood issues. Winter storms have already started hitting in some areas of the East coast and Mid West, and people who know these things say this storm season promises to be a rough one.

So wherever you are, take care of yourselves.

Bleak Weather

- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Dear love, where the red lillies blossomed and grew,

The white snows are falling;

And all through the wood, where I wandered with you,

The loud winds are calling;

And the robin that piped to us tune upon tune,

Neath the elm—you remember,

Over tree-top and mountain has followed the June,

And left us—December.

Has left, like a friend that is true in the sun,

And false in the shadows.

He has found new delights, in the land where he's gone,

Greener woodlands and meadows.

What care we? let him go! let the snow shroud the lea,

Let it drift on the heather!

We can sing through it all; I have you—you have me,

And we’ll laugh at the weather.

The old year may die, and a new one be born

That is bleaker and colder;

But it cannot dismay us; we dare it—we scorn,

For love makes us bolder.

Ah Robin! sing loud on the far-distant lea,

Thou friend in fair weather;

But here is a song sung, that’s fuller of glee,

By two warm hearts together.

The Soul has Bandaged moments #360

- Emily Dickinson

The Soul has Bandaged moments –
When too appalled to stir –
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her –
Salute her, with long fingers –
Caress her freezing hair –
Sip, Goblin, from the very lips
The Lover – hovered – o’er –
Unworthy, that a thought so mean
Accost a Theme – so – fair ­–
The soul has moments of escape –
When bursting all the doors –
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings opon the Hours,
As do the Bee – delirious borne –
Long Dungeoned from his Rose –
Touch Liberty – then know no more,
But Noon, and Paradise –
The Soul’s retaken moments –
When, Felon led along,
With shackles on the plumed feet,
And staples, in the song,
The Horror welcomes her, again,
These, are not brayed of Tongue –

from: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Copyright 1998.

For Joe

- Sandra Simonds

Locked in the beauty of the pearl, far from frail,
         these people who claim to love us still
they don’t give up much, do they, sealed? To eradicate class—
      the looking glass of it, the complex glare: “Let me introduce
xxx, impoverished poet.” Winter let up
     like a terrible religion. In its wake, a politics came,
      profane. You were on a train
from Philly to Mass. Winter let up like bands and globes
      and globules and I could feel the trade ships
in my bloodstream, the blood that made me,
        and I wanted to kill it
       really bad like a war path. They said my poems
         were a mess. Well, if that’s the case, then, go ahead.
Strike one match and the mansion will go up in its own ash,
in its obsession with accumulation against the glint of trees.

from: Poem-a-Day. Copyright 2016.

Quote of the Day

Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.

 - Voltaire

Nothing Is Far

- Robert Francis

 

Though I have never caught the word

Of God from any calling bird,

I hear all that the ancients heard.

 

Though I have seen no deity

Enter or leave a twilit tree,

I see all that the seers see.

 

A common stone can still reveal

Something not stone, not seen, yet real.

What may a common stone conceal?

 

Nothing is far that once was near.

Nothing is hid that once was clear.

Nothing was God that is not here.

 

Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.

Here in the sun I sit alone

Between the known and the unknown.

 

 

from: Collected Poems, 1936-1976  Copyright 1976.

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.