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

March 1, 2022

Reflection 

March  1,  2022

 

Thought for Today

 

 

“Beneath the cross of Christ, one learns to love.”

 

 

 February 28, 2022

Reflection

 February 28, 2022

 

Thought for Today

 “After a certain age,  a poet’s main rival is the poet he used to be.” 

 

William Logan

Parnassus 27

nos. 1 & 2

 February 27, 2022

Thought for Today

 

“In the last analysis it is our conception of death which decides the answers to all the questions life puts to us.”

 

Dag Hammarskjold, Diaries