Belief is a murmur in the heart of truth
Projecting our faith in so knowing our proof
At one with the innocence and calamity of youth
But a pilgrim in search of full sails...

b
 

Dogs And Wolves

Across eternity, across its snow,
I see my unwritten poems:
I see the spoor of their paws dappling 
the august whiteness of the snow:
bristles raging, bloody-tongued,
lean greyhounds and wolves, 
leaping over the dykes,
running under the shade of the trees of the wilderness,
taking the narrow defile of glens,
making for the steepness of windy mountains;
their baying yell shrieking
across the hard barenesses of the terrible times,
their everlasting barking in my ears,
their hot onrush seizing my mind;
career of wolves and eerie dogs
swift in pursuit of the quarry,
through the forests without veering,
over the mountain tops with sheering;
the mild mad dogs of my poetry,
wolves in chase of loneliness,
loveliness of soul and face,
a white deer over hills and plains,
the deer of your gentle beloved beauty, 
a hunt without halt, without respite.

Translation from Gaelic

Now you'd be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you.

Now you'd be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies.

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time.

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears.

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife.

 fuzzy wrote: 

Sonnet XCIV: They That Have Power to Hurt and Will Do None

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

William Shakespeare

Ogden Nash was one of my mother's favorite poets and this is one of my favorite poems by him.

Are You a Snodgrass, Too?

It is possible that the most individual and international, social and economic collisions
Result from humanity's being divided into two main divisions.
Both of which are irreconcilable.
And neither is by the other beguilable
Their lives are spent in mutual interference
And yet you cannot tell them apart by their outward appearance.
Instead the only way in which you are able to tell one group from the other
Is to observe them at the table.
Because the only visible way in which one group from the other varies,
Is in the treatment of the cream and sugar on cereal and berries.
Group A, which we will call the Swozzlers
Because it is a very suitable name I deem
First applies the sugar, then swozzles it all over the place
Pouring on the cream;
And as fast as they pour the sugar on, they swozzle it away
but such thriftlessness means nothing to ruthless egotists like they.
They just continue to scoop and swozzle and swozzle and scoop,
Until there is nothing left for the Snodgrasses or second group.
A Snodgrass is a kind handsome intelligent person
Who pours on the cream first
And then deftly sprinkles the sugar over the cereal or berries
After they have been properly immersed,
Thus assuring himself that the sugar will remain on the cereal and berries
Where it can do some good—which is his wish
Instead of being swozzled away to the bottom of the dish.
The facts of the case for the Snodgrasses are so evident
That it is ridiculous to debate them.
But this is unfortunate for the Snodgrasses as it only causes
The sinister and vengeful Swozzlers all the more to hate them.
Swozzlers are irked by the superior Snodgasses' intelligence and nobility,
And they lose no opportunity of inflicting on them every kind of incivility.
If you have read that somebody has been run over by an automobile,
You may be sure that victim was a Snodgrass and a Swozzler was at the wheel.
Swozzlers start wars and Snodgrasses get killed in them.
Swozzlers sell waterfront lots and Snodgrasses get malaria when they try to build in them.
Swozzlers invent fashionable diets and drive Snodgrasses crazy
With tables of vitamins and calories
Swozzlers go to Congress and think up new taxes
And Snodgrasses pay their salaries.
Swozzlers bring tigers back alive and Snodgrasses get eaten by anacondas;
Snodgrasses are depositors and Swozzlers are absconders.
Swozzlers hold straight flushes and Snodgrasses hold four of a kind.
Swozzlers step heavily on the toes of Snodgrasses' shoes as soon as they are shined.
Whatever achievements Snodgrasses achieve,
Swozzlers always top them;
Snodgrasses say stop me if you've heard this one
And Swozzlers stop them.
Swozzlers are teeming with useful tricks of the trade
That are not included in a standard university curricula.
The world in general is their oyster,
And the Snodgrasses in particular.
So I hope that for your sake dear reader that you are a Swozzler,
But I hope for everybody's that you're not.
And I also wish that everybody else was a nice amiable Snodgrass too,
Because then Life would be just one sweet, harmonious mazurka or gavotte.

I spent seven hours yesterday at my daughter's house
helping her expand their garden by at least ten times.
We dug up sod by the shovelful, shook off the dirt as
best we could; sod into the wheelbarrow and off to the
pile at the edge of the yard. Then all that over and over
again. Five hours total work-time, with time out for lunch
and supper. By the time I got home I knew all too well
that seventy-two is not thirty-five; I could barely move.

I got to quit earlier than Nadine. She told me I'd done
enough and that I should go get a beer and lie down on
the chaise lounge and cheer her on, which is what I did.

All this made me remember my father forty years ago
helping me with my garden. My father's dead now, and
has been dead for many years, which is how I'll be one
of these days too. And then Nadine will help her child,
who is not yet here, with her garden. Old Nadine, aching
and sore, will be in my empty shoes, cheering on her own.

So it goes. The wheel turns, generation after generation,
around and around. We ride for a little while, get off and
somebody else gets on. Over and over, again and again.

 fuzzy wrote: 
Really a great SONG!!!

Company Policy

My mission statement
was a pencil sharpener
and a treehouse

Now days I just wing it 

thank you

b 

The worst thing about it is the food.
Vegetables boiled to a gray sheen...
mushy, flavorless, and vitamin-free.
Served to grandmothers
that stare at walls and cry at memories;
filled with the phantoms of friendlier times.
Where Elvis Presley still lives
and echoes down the halls
embittering old men defiled by time,
trying to gum their flavorless
chicken-fried steak into submission...
with the promise of a bit of custard
tasting like scorched eggs.

Church Fair by Jane Kenyon Who knows what I might find on tables under the maple trees— perhaps a saucer in Aunt Lois's china pattern to replace the one I broke the summer I was thirteen, and visiting for a week. Never in all these years have I thought of it without a warm surge of embarrassment. I'll go through the closets and cupboards to find things for the auction. I'll bake a peach pie for the food table, and rolls for the supper, Grandma Kenyon's recipe, which came down to me along with her legs and her brooding disposition. "Mrs. Kenyon," the doctor used to tell her, you are simply killing yourself with work." This she repeated often, with keen satisfaction. She lived to be a hundred and three, surviving all her children, including the one so sickly at birth that she had to carry him everywhere on a pillow for the first four months. Father suffered from a weak chest — bronchitis, pneumonias, and pleurisy — and early on books and music became his joy. Surely these clothes are from another life— not my own. I'll drop them off on the way to town. I'm getting the peaches today, so they'll be ripe by Saturday.

I still can’t get it right

Children 

Child Development

The Unknowable
Who had children. Who died.
Who found himself lucky after thirty years
and stumbling home realised
it was a simple error.
Who ruled behind the scenes in the Department of Misinformation,
who was later conscripted
to underwrite Armageddon.
Whose hand was lost in a sawmill
and was met again as the strange dust
of a new-found galaxy.
Who migrated to the other world
but came home to bury the dog.
Who divorced and died of alcoholism
in the country town where destiny misplaced him.
Who topped high school, failed everything else
twice, married money, then slept through
the death of three children.
Who was invisible, became a wall, became a street,
entered real estate, bought a city,
retired into owning world opinion.
Who saw his son indicted for reluctance, shackled and maimed,
blamed for the colour of the sky.
Who inscribed his name in the old script,
the one no one reads anymore,
the one where things inscribe themselves
so what they are
reads itself back
in us.
Who was my shadow when daylight was.

Peter Boyle

For a Five-Year Old

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
Into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see and I explain
That it would be unkind to leave it there:
It might crawl to the floor; we must take care
That no one squashes it. You understand,
And carry it outside, with careful hand,
To eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
Your gentleness is moulded still by words
From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
From me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
Your closest relatives, and who purveyed
The harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.

~ Fleur Adcock

 ScottN wrote: 
Wow ... just ... wow ...

When Intimacy Changes into Indifference
Time just flows past
And you never notice
Till subtle changes come bubbling to the surface;
When intimacy turns into indifference. Time just flows past
And you never notice
Till your close friends just drift away;
When intimacy turns into indifference. Time just flows past
And you never notice
Till people who supported you in tough times just disappear;
When intimacy turns into indifference. Time just flows past
And you never notice
Till one's cross feels too heavy;
When intimacy turns into indifference.

Jasbir Chatterjee