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PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY DESTROYED BY FLOOD

Crawford, Texas -- A tragic flood this morning destroyed the personal library of President George W. Bush. The flood began in the presidential bathroom where both of the books were kept. Both books have been lost. A presidential spokesman said the president was devastated, as he had almost finished coloring the second one.

The White House tried to call FEMA, but there was no answer.

Magnolia, 04-16-06

Easter Flowers

The magnolia’s slender white fingers blossomed
bridal-white today, but the unblemished petals
will snow from the branches before many days pass.
The bush was two feet high when
friends planted it to honor
the memory of our daughter. Now
it reaches past the roof, flowering anew
each cruel April. As snowdrops and daffodils
push through warming earth,
so with each new grief arise images
of all my lost ones.
The dust of their passing
blows into my eyes
and tears spring up unbidden.

No plant grows amid the stone pile
and fresh-turned earth of my young cat’s grave
yet, though forsythia above his cairn burst
into full yellow the morning after he died.
Now cut daffodils and hyacinths wilt
across the stones. Before the magnolia’s white petals
rust and fall, I will plant hydrangea
by the forsythia, and surround the bushes
with rosemary.

LLC, 04-16-06, ed. 05-20-06

Specific enough?

Is it really fine to litter?

(photo by JBR)

No what?

Be specific.

















(photo by JBR)

Visit These

If you like wordplay, children's books, or writing, you might like this website:
http://gottabook.blogspot.com/
and if you like Middle English, here's one for you:
http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/

Easter/Passover/springtime greetings,
LLC

Requiescat in Pacem

William Sloane Coffin was “the conscience of the country,” says Cora Weiss, peace activist. “He questioned authority before that phrase came into vogue.” In an interview with NPR in 1994, Rev. Coffin said,

Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart is full of hope you can be persistent even if you are not optimistic. I keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing does the evidence have any chance of changing.

Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., civil activist who opposed nuclear arms, poverty, anti-Semitism and championed civil rights, died on April 12, 2006 at age 81.

In Memoriam: Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

~Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

~The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.


Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
requiescat in pacem

http://www.pbs.org/now/society/coffin.html

...and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful...


~e.e.cummings

http://www.web-books.com/classics/Poetry/anthology/cummings/InJust.htm

(from) be of love(a little)

…remember love by frequent
anguish(imagine
Her least never with most
memory)give entirely each
Forever its freedom

~e. e. cummings
from Collected Poems. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1938

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/156

photo by JBR

VITAL

Tired tonight, so
just one
sip of simile
before sleep.

Late,
thirsting awake
I plunge
both hands
elbow-deep
into poems
like bowls
of fresh water
brimming
with sounds
bring
cupped hands
to mouth
dripping
syllables
and greedily
swallow
refreshing
draughts.

At last:
throat
and soul
are
soothed.

~LLC

Proverb: the cat with many names is well-loved.
Mr. Pluff, Puppycat, Lionman, Teddy Bear, Watson's Twin, Woolly Mammoth, Bunnyfeet, Saint Bernard Kitten, Lovecat, Sherlock.

Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go: but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains - but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,-
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

The late Sherlock, d. 04-02-06.
We will miss the dear cat.

The Sherlock half of Sherlock-and-Watson

from The Unsayable Said

Donald Hall, in his essay The Unsayable Said, writes, "Poetry is not talk. It sounds like talk...but poetry is talk altered into art, speech slowed down and attended to, words arranged for the reader who contracts to read them for their whole heft of association and noise...Reading with care, so that a wholeness of language engages a wholeness of reading body and mind, we absorb poetry not with our eyes only nor with our ears at a reading. We read with our mouths that chew on vowel and consonant; we read with our limbed muscles that enact the dance of the poem's rhythm; we read alert to history and the context of words...The poets we honor most are those who--by studious imagination, by continuoous connection to the sensuous body, and by spirit steeped in the practice and learning of language--publish in their work the unsayable said."

(c) Donald Hall, Coffee Canyon Press, 1993
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate_current.html

VII

What need of a lamp
when day lightens us,
what need to bind love
when love stands
with such radiant wings over us?

What need--
yet to sing love,
love must first shatter us.

-HD
(from "Eros," Miscellaneous Poems 1914-1917)