Winter on the Oregon Coast
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
green grass and high tides forever
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
Posted by WackyMommy in Art, Pacific Ocean, Steve |
Comments Off on green grass and high tides forever
Yeats (poem of the day)
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
(The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first World War.)
“There But For the Grace” — Wislawa Szymborska
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
poem of the day
“There But For the Grace”
by Wislawa Szymborska
“It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened sooner. Later.
Nearer. Farther.
It happened not to you.
You survived because you were the first.
You survived because you were the last.
Because you were alone. Because of people.
Because you turned left. Because you turned right.
Because rain fell. Because a shadow fell.
Because sunny weather prevailed.
Luckily, there was a wood.
Luckily there were no trees.
Luckily there was a rail, a hook, a beam, a brake,
a frame, a bend, a millimeter, a second.
Luckily a straw was floating on the surface.
Thanks to, because, and yet, in spite of.
What would have happened had not a hand, a foot,
by a step, a hairsbreadth
by sheer coincidence.
So you’re here? Straight from a moment still ajar?
The net had one eyehole, and you got through it?
There’s no end to my wonder, my silence.
Listen
how fast your heart beats in me.”
Translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
oh, what a haul!
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
happy Sunday!
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
(Just a shout-out for my girl Judy Blume.)
letter from my friend/note to a friend
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
Going through old letters and cards — am unable to part with many of them because that’s just how it is around here. Found the best letter from my then-friend, who I am happy to report is also my now-friend, i just had a nice long talk w/ her the other night, well. We’ve been friends for many, many years. Circa 1987, she xeroxed an interesting essay that ran in the New York Times, about a woman who had to go through her aunt’s papers, after she passed. (Only her aunt wasn’t really her aunt, she was her mom’s friend… and she saved everything.) (Sorta like yours truly.) She xeroxed different sections of the article, so it didn’t cut off the edges.
“Hope you can put this together enough to read it,” she wrote. “The last line is, ‘I put it down in ink, all of it.'”
(love.) (love, love, love. and I wish people still wrote letters, sent clippings, poured their hearts out.) (do they? yes or no, you decide.)
also, RIP, dear Tami, 4/6/1964-3/25/2015
, 
.