(Photo by Steve Rawley)
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
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
happy April, happy spring, happy, happy (almost) everything
(Photo by Steve Rawley)
Doesn’t Steve take pretty pictures?
My baby is a teenager now. My other teenager came to school with me and volunteered, ohmyGod the babies love her. Love. One of the kinders flung herself, as kinders are wont to do, into Wacky Girl’s arms.
I love you! (hugs one of the other aides, then me, then the other aide again.) I love you! And I love you! I love everyone!
Runs down the hall. Runs into us later, loves on Wacky Girl some more.
She is my friend, she tells two of the other littles. Runs down the hall, yells, Bye, friend!
#bestthingsinlife #free