“How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason,
Reason none,
If what parts, can so remain.”
― William Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle
Poetry
“Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow
Try to remember, and if you remember
Then follow”
If each day falls inside each night, there exists a well where clarity is imprisoned. We need to sit on the rim of the well of darkness and fish for fallen light with patience. Pablo Neruda
A young girl wearing a falconer’s mitt working with a large bird in a small living room.
Untitled (Brooklyn, NY), 2005, Anthony Lepore
Lucks, My Fair Falcon
by Sir Thomas Wyatt
Lucks, my fair falcon, and your fellows all,
How well pleasant it were your liberty!
Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall.
But they that sometime liked my company:
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.
Lo what a proof in light adversity!
But ye my birds, I swear by all your bells,
Ye be my friends, and so be but few else.
Hymn to Iris
Alice OswaldQuick moving goddess of the rainbow
You whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-throughPut your hands
Put your heaven-taken shape down
On the ground. Now. AnywhereLike a bent- down bough of nothing
A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin airAnd let there be instantly in its underlight –
At street corners, on swings, out of car windows –
A three-moment blessing for all bridgesMay impossible rifts be often delicately crossed
By bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plankMay the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over
On flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain
And bridges of see-through stone, the living-space of drips and echoesMay two fields be bridged by a stile
And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glanceRichardAnd may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,
Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing
Yinka Shonibare, Planets in My Head, Physics, 2010.
A Solar Eclipse Ella Wheeler Wilcox In that great journey of the stars through space About the mighty, all-directing Sun, The pallid, faithful Moon, has been the one Companion of the Earth. Her tender face, Pale with the swift, keen purpose of that race, Which at Time’s natal hour was first begun, Shines ever on her lover as they run And lights his orbit with her silvery smile. Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise, Down from her beaten path she softly slips, And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes, Then in the gloaming finds her lover’s lips. While far and near the men our world call wise See only that the Sun is in eclipse.
“Stork Story”
By Shel Silverstein
You know the stork brings babies,
But did you also know
He comes and gets the older folks
When it’s their time to go?
Zooms right down and scoops them up,
Then flaps back out the door
And flies them to the factory where
They all were made before.
And there their skin is tightened up,
Their muscles all are toned,
Their wrinkles all are ironed out,
They’re given brand-new bones.
Ol’ bent backs are straightened up,
New teeth are added too,
Tired hearts are all repaired
And made to work like new.
Their memories are all removed
And they’re shrunk down, and then
The stork flies them back down to earth
As newborn babes again.
“When someone has a strong intuitive connection,
Buddhism suggests that it’s because of karma, some past connection.” — Richard Gere
“We are dust and to dust return. In the end we’re neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt,
neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.” — Pablo Neruda
“What ye have been ye still shall be, When we are dust the dust among, O yellow flowers!”
— Henry Austin Dobson
Zebra Question
by Shel Silverstein
I asked the zebra
Are you black with white stripes?
Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me,
Or you good with bad habits?
Or are you bad with good habits?
Are you noisy with quiet times?
Or are you quiet with noisy times?
Are you happy with some sad days?
Or are you sad with some happy days?
Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?
And on and on and on and on
And on and on he went.
I’ll never ask a zebra
About stripes
Again.
“A true confession: I believe in a soluble fish.”
― Charles Simic, The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs
Maverick Mist 