Something New: Celebrating our Boxwood by poem and photo

everything depends upon
sunlight

streaming through dead
leaves

with the blue
sky

behind the orange
glow

I love celebrating our garden, but the Boxwood that divides our front yard from our neighbor to the east never has been the highlight, however did something special today. And after it called out to me for the second time, I said, "OK" and got the camera.

A Few of My Favorite Things 4 ~ Woodpecker, a Haiku

Photo by Paul Stein

I love birds, but if forced to choose a favorite family, let me say it is the Picidae.

Maybe my next bird mosaic will be from my favorite group.  But for now I must sharpen my writing skills because I will be faced with a Haiku challenge on New Years Eve.

Woven together,

forests need undulating
flight of woodpeckers

A World War I Poem from one who was there, Wilfred Owens

from Flickr by Tim Brauhn

In college, a botany professor, who had barely survived Vietnam, handed me a book of poems by Wilfred Owens.  It included this poem ~

Dulce et Decorum est

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The Old Lie ~ a line from the Roman lyrical poet Horace's Odes (III.2.13). The line can be roughly translated into English as: "It is sweet and right to die for your country."


"

How do you wake? Elling sings Roethke

Jj

here is to waking up

Vlog: Red with Billy Child's Wheelbarrow

Red Wheelbarrows are important:

Driving up I-95 in fall 2007, while on tour, I was struck by the stark beauty of the New England autumn - the red, orange, gold, green, and yellow leaves of the tress rushing by the car window, the small clearings, the little pathways. It brought to mind the William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow and I knew that this project would be an impressionistic depiction of what I'd experienced on that drive. I wanted to capture, not just a sense of autumn but also the movement of autumn - wind blowing leaves as they spiral through the air in little eddies, the drumming of the rain as it hits the brown earth, the stillness of a lonely red wheelbarrow in the middle of an open meadow. Billy Childs

The poem that came to Billy Childs, is a poem on my classroom wall:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

William Carlos Williams