Grandparents Farm
The Lama
The one-l lama,
He’s a priest.
The two-l llama,
He’s a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn’t any
Three-l lllama.*
— Ogden Nash
Sometimes life hands us a mirror and dares us to take a look. – L. M. Fields
Friday 13th: breaking a mirror leads top 10 superstitions.
POINSETTIAS (Auchenflower)
– Emily Bulcock (1923)
Midwinter clutches on the skirts of June-
And lays her blighting touch on bud and flower,
Her west winds, shrilling, play an eerie tune,
Like witches’ mirth, in wild, triumphant hour!
Grey grows the world – yet see on hill and slope,
As bright thoughts flash through dull grief-laden day,
The red poinsettia raise its flag of hope!
And sudden, Spring seems not so far away.
Flame-Heart
by Claude McKay
SO much have I forgotten in ten years,
So much in ten brief years; I have forgot
What time the purple apples come to juice
And what month brings the shy forget-me-not;
Forgotten is the special, startling season 5
Of some beloved tree’s flowering and fruiting,
What time of year the ground doves brown the fields
And fill the noonday with their curious fluting:
I have forgotten much, but still remember
The poinsettia’s red, blood-red in warm December.
Full poem here.
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever spinning reel
As the images unwind
Like the circles
That you find
In the windmills of your mind
The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature. – Robert Louis Stevenson
Artist’s Life
by Wheeler Wilcox
Of all the waltzes the great Strauss wrote,
mad with melody, rhythm–rife
From the very first to the final note,
Give me his “Artist’s Life!”
It stirs my blood to my finger ends,
Thrills me and fills me with vague unrest,
And all that is sweetest and saddest blends
Together within my breast.
It brings back that night in the dim arcade,
In love’s sweet morning and life’s best prime,
When the great brass orchestra played and played,
And set our thoughts to rhyme.
It brings back that Winter of mad delights,
Of leaping pulses and tripping feet,
And those languid moon-washed Summer nights
When we heard the band in the street.
It brings back rapture and glee and glow,
It brings back passion and pain and strife,
And so of all the waltzes I know,
Give me the “Artist’s Life.”
For it is so full of the dear old time–
So full of the dear friends I knew.
And under its rhythm, and lilt, and rhyme,
I am always finding–you.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(excerpt)
I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
“After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.”
– Nelson Mandela
Maverick Mist 