THE DUCK
by Ogden Nash
Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.
It is specially fond
Of a puddle or pond.
When it dines or sups,
It bottoms ups.
Nature
“Great Goddess, Mistress of cats,
Lady of love, beautiful Vana-Goddess,
Fulfill my greatest needs, O glorious one.
Teach me the magic I need.
Give me a glimpse of your deep wisdom.
Teach me in dreams. Enrich my life.
O Lady, you are Golden-Tears of Asgard
Lady of love, beautiful Vana-Goddess,
You are the Shape-shifter, the Sayer,
The Independent One.
Give me the strength and the magic I need.”
– Freya
“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” — Henry Adams
Weekly Photo Challenge: Chaos
The Wild Duck
by John Masefield
Twilight. Red in the West.
Dimness. A glow on the wood.
The teams plod home to rest.
The wild duck come to glean.
O souls not understood,
What a wild cry in the pool;
What things have the farm ducks seen
That they cry so–huddle and cry?
Only the soul that goes.
Eager. Eager. Flying.
Over the globe of the moon,
Over the wood that glows.
Wings linked. Necks a-strain,
A rush and a wild crying.
A cry of the long pain
In the reeds of a steel lagoon,
In a land that no man knows.
The Hawk
William Butler Yeats
‘Call down the hawk from the air;
Let him be hooded or caged
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild.’
‘I will not be clapped in a hood,
Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist,
Now I have learnt to be proud
Hovering over the wood
In the broken mist
Or tumbling cloud.’
‘What tumbling cloud did you cleave,
Yellow-eyed hawk of the mind,
Last evening? that I, who had sat
Dumbfounded before a knave,
Should give to my friend
A pretence of wit.’
The Trouble with Reading
by William Stafford
When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
And the meaning has to go find an author again.
But when we read, its just print – deciphering,
Like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
But lose what the frost is, and all that the world
Pressed so desperately behind
So some time let’s discover how the ink
Feels, to be clutching all that eternity onto
Page after page. But maybe it is better not
To know; ignorance, that wide country,
Rewards you just to accept it. You plunge;
It holds you. And you have to become a rich darkness.
I do what I feel impelled to do, as an artist would. Scientists function in the same way. I see all these as creative activities, as all part of the process of discovery. Perhaps that’s one of the characteristics of what I call the evolvers, any subset of the population who keep things moving in a positive, creative, constructive way, revealing the truth and beauty that exists in life and in nature. Jonas Salk
A Dream
William Blake
Once a dream did weave a shade
O’er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:
‘Oh my children! do they cry,
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see,
Now return and weep for me.’
Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, ‘What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?
‘I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle’s hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home!’
Maverick Mist 