March 5, 2022

Reflection

 March 5, 2022

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

This poem was originally published in Xaipe1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), reissued in 2004 by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company. Reprinted here by permission of the publisher. Copyright expires 2045.

Poem by e.e. cummings

March 4, 2022

Thought for Today

 

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

 

Maya Angelou

 March 4,  2022

Reflection

 

         BUYING  A  BOOK  OF  POEMS

You have to read a lot of poems -
till you come to the one that is 
the poem that is sitting there waiting
for you - like a rock - like a bird -
like a footprint from someone else -
someone else who wants to walk
around inside your heart - and talk.

                                              @ Andy Costello

                                                  March 1, 2022

(a) Andy Costello

March 1, 2022

 March 3,  2022

 DIGGING

 

By Seamus Heaney

 
Between my finger and my thumb   
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
 
Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down
 
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   
Bends low, comes up twenty years away   
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   
Where he was digging.
 
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
 
By God, the old man could handle a spade.   
Just like his old man.
 
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
 
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
 
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
 

Seamus Heaney, "Digging" from Death of a Naturalist. Copyright 1966 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC

 March 3, 2022

Reflection