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

March 2, 2022

BROWN

 
Brown: the color of earth, the color of humility, the color of wood, the color of foundations – the down below.
 
Brown: fundamental and non-splashy. It’s there, but there and not noticed.
 
I ask tiny kids in classrooms, “Favorite color?” and as I speed around the room, out come all the colors, but rarely brown – even from brown kids.
 
Brown – the color of food before it grows – earth – soil – and the color of food when it’s all finished, and it comes out of the bowels of our earth.
 
Brown – can’t picture any flags with brown in its fabric – yet the soldiers below – wear brown uniforms. The big shots know that those who die for and with the flag will be fighting in mud and holes – down there - down in the earth.  The parents know that’s the color of graves – on all 4 sides of the rectangular hole that the casket is lowered into.
 
Brown – a nice sound – a poet’s word – rhymes with town, clown, down, and sounds like crown – feels like solid, wood, earth, doesn’t feel like water or sky.
 
Brown ….
 
Too many of us have not experienced dirt roads – country roads – back roads – that are twisty, narrow and can get washed out.
 
The metaphor is lost with macadam and super-highways and city streets.
 
    “Afoot and light hearted
        I take to the open road,
    Healthy, free, the world
        before me,
    The long brown path before me
        leading wherever I choose.”
 
                    Walt Whitman,
                    Song of the Open Road, I
 

                                                                                              © Andy Costello, Reflections 2022

 

 March 2,  2022

 

The Hollow Men

 

A penny for the Old Guy
 
I
 
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
As quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
 
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without meaning.

 

 from T.S. Eliot