From the Flashcards: Some Spanish Vocabulary

I was working on absorbing some more words this morning, notably:

the fog  =   la niebla

the flood = la inundacion

the storm = la tormenta

the rain =   la lluvia

I'll see if those will stay with me.

painting:  Rainy Meadow  by Henna L on the DeviantArt website.



Meanwhile, here's a poem
by Edward Thomas:

Rain

By Edward Thomas

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me

Remembering again that I shall die

And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks

For washing me cleaner than I have been

Since I was born into solitude.

Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:

But here I pray that none whom once I loved

Is dying tonight or lying still awake

Solitary, listening to the rain,

Either in pain or thus in sympathy

Helpless among the living and the dead,

Like a cold water among broken reeds,

Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,

Like me who have no love which this wild rain

Has not dissolved except the love of death,

If love it be towards what is perfect and

Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Source: The Longman Anthology of Poetry (Pearson, 2006)

Going Postal

I opened Yahoo this morning and saw news of another shooting in a public place, this time at a FedEX Facility near Atlanta.

These violent acts by violently angry individuals - usually men-  keep happening in our country. Are they happening in other countries?  What the "other countries" have is violence on a much broader scale. 

Has human life always been this way, and we are just much more aware of it because of our access to the news?

I keep thinking of Yeats' poem. Worth posting here:


   THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

widening gyre - art by emily tellez

My Birthday Green and Golden

This witty quote says it all:

As I turn 66, I really wonder.  I look back to the decades of the 80's and 90's in particular and I do not know where they went.   Settings from those years show up regularly in my dreams, and generally, not too happily.  They are not nightmares, but they feature things like neverending dirty laundry and crowds of disconnected and displaced washing machines.  What does that mean?

I am grateful each year that I was born in late April.


The gift for the day is the gorgeous green weather.  The gardens and lawns around here are flourishing:

This photo, the view from my window, taken in the early evening yesterday, reminds me of Robert Frost's poem:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay. 

- Robert Frost


True as that is, it doesn't counter the joy I felt today when I saw that my Butterfly Bushes had survived the long and unusually cold winter:

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19977#sthash.DRhCVPHp.dpuf

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19977#sthash.DRhCVPHp.dpuf

Head Cold Whining

How/Why did I get a miserable head cold in this beautiful Spring weather?

Chick-burr-CHICK!

That's the call of the White-eyed Vireo!

 

photo from Audubon.org

Highlight of our birding yesterday.  This bird is usually quite elusive and difficult to see, either high up in the trees or lurking in the green thickets.  But yesterday we heard several, very loud and close, and had great "naked eye" views of one.

Another frequent sighting yesterday was the Towhee-  I love this guy and his call:

photo by Diane Porter

Another breathtaking view was a long look at a mature Cooper's Hawk in the act of building a nest high in a fir tree.  Back and forth he/she went, scooping through the trees, gathering sticks and bringing  them back to the nest, seemingly oblivious of us.

photo by davidandry is good, but doesn't do it justice.

We heard the call of the Prairie Warbler numerous times, but didn't get a look. This is one of my favorite birds:

photo by Jim McCormack


It was chilly yesterday and is chilly today; migration is still slow.  I'll be out again tomorrow, I hope.

 

Earth Day

One of my friends and I are going birding this morning at Codorus State Park  near Hanover PA... one of Pennsylvania's lovely green places.

Here are some photos and art and a poem for this day:

Virginia Bluebells in my garden

The Peace of Wild Things

By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Violets in my garden

Bobolink  by Alexis Ross Hayes

Sedge Wren by Diane Porter

Pine Warbler  by Anne Harlan

Pääsiäisleipä and Paska

I love to bake bread.

Yesterday, I had the luxury of a whole day without interruption to bake. So I tried two new ( for me) recipes for Easter bread.

Usually on the Christmas and Easter feasts, I make Stollen, but this time I tried Pääsiäisleipä, a Finnish bread, and Paska, Ukrainian Easter bread.

They turned out well.  Here's what they look like.  I didn't take these photos -  forgot, and at this point, the loaves are in the freezer and will appear on Easter morning, and the samples I set out for the hungry hordes  are largely demolished.

Pääsiäisleipä ( no idea how to pronounce this one)

very similar to Stollen, but just sliced almonds and golden raisins .

Paska:

 

very similar to Challah, but the dough is even softer and finer with the recipe I used.

Here's a poem I wrote a long time ago about making bread. It seemed appropriate to post now, during the Paschal Triduum:

Recipe

Yeast rises

like praise

clings to the cloth,

leaves its thready face there.

Dough rolls smooth

springs back

seamless in hand

as thought.

The oven opens and closes

its arms.

Smell seeps

from room to room.

Bread, as finished

as a child.

Every slice of the knife

it sings its fearful litany:

I live in the jaws of hunger.

I break as I give

I rise as I die.

 

Hope Strums Her Harp

a villanelle I've been working on for a while... inspired by this painting:

Hope   1885   George Frederick Watts

  Hope strums her harp and sits astride the world.

  A blindfold keeps her focused as the sound

of peace and mercy’s fragile flags unfurl.

 As music from the hemlock trees uncurls

as unresolved boundaries still resound,

 Hope strums her harp and sits astride the world.

 While syllables of weapons clash and whirl

 while oceans twist with Fukushima waste,

 still  peace and mercy’s fragile flags unfurl.

With music smooth and cool as oystered pearl

 Pacific tides blunt poison gas until

 Hope strums her harp and sits astride the world

 This time let no trench gas grenades be hurled.

  The ship won’t meet the iceberg this time round.

 Hope strums her harp and sits astride the world

 as peace and mercy’s fragile flags unfurl.

You Talk Too Much

You Talk Too Much

You talk too much
You worry me to death
You talk too much
You even worry my pet

You just talk
Talk too much

You talk about people
That you don't know
You talk about people
Wherever you go

You just talk
Talk too much

You talk about people
That you've never seen
You talk about people
You can make me scream

You just talk
you talk too much

You talk about people
That you've never seen
You talk about people
You can make me scream

( Joe Jones, 1960)

As usual, I was tuning in to the webcam and chat on the Great Dane Service Dog Project this afternoon, and listened in to the online moaning ( I can’t think of any other name for it) of one of the women who is new to the site and who went down there to the farm to volunteer today.  She had her feelings hurt in a large way by the owner of the farm, who is known to be , shall I say, a blunt and even rude speaker.

 

Anyway… it boils down to the part where the would-be volunteer was asked to go to one of the outbuildings to do some chores; on her way out , she overheard the owner say to her other regular helpers ( who had been very nice to this volunteer). It was on the order of  “How did you stand that woman in here with you these hours?  I’m glad I just arrived. She drives me crazy: she never stops talking!  Blah! Blah! Blah!”

I do not think the owner intended for the volunteer to hear that, but she did, and she left in tears.

She had the whole chat room buzzing through the afternoon, debating about rudeness, ingratitude( on the part of the owner), entitlement, oversensitivity ( on the part of the volunteer).

This episode got me thinking about  bluntness and rudeness; but also about people who really do talk too much.   How do you tell someone in an unhurtful way that he/she talks too much?   I can’t think of a way.  I generally avoid such people because even though they are generally wonderful souls, they get on my nerves.  It’s that unconsciousness of one’s effect on others.  I have been guilty of this plenty of times, but in recent years, I have become aware of it in myself, and generally keep pretty quiet. 

As one wit has observed, “It’s a terrible death to be talked to death.”

Palm Sunday

This isn't specifically a Palm Sunday poem, but it is a Lenten poem, by Phyllis Levin:

Lenten Song

By Phillis Levin

That the dead are real to us

Cannot be denied,

That the living are more real

When they are dead

Terrifies, that the dead can rise

As the living do is possible

Is possible to surmise,

But all the stars cannot come near

All we meet in an eye.

Flee from me, fear, as soot

Flies in a breeze, do not burn

Or settle in my sight,

I’ve tasted you long enough,

Let me savor

Something otherwise.

Who wakes beside me now

Suits my soul, so I turn to words

Only to say he changes

Into his robe, rustles a page,

He raises the lid of the piano

To release what’s born in its cage.

If   words come back

To say they compromise

Or swear again they have died,

There’s no news in that, I reply,

But a music without notes

These notes comprise, still

As spring beneath us lies,

Already something otherwise.

 

 

 

 

( source:  Poetry magazine  2013)