Tuesday, April 30, 2013

LOLCATS WEEKLY ROUND-UP FOR 30 APRIL 2013

Here's the weekly best of what I've gleaned from I Can Has Cheezburger efforts. There are some really creative folks out there.

 
















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30 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE


      
(September, 1956, New York, NY by Vivian Maier)

      

TAXI

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?



By Amy Lowell

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Monday, April 29, 2013

29 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE

(Hare on Bedfordshire farm; photo by Owen Hearn)

TWO TRAMPS IN MUD TIME

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.


Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.


The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.


A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn't blue,
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.


The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut's now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don't forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.


The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You'd think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.


Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.


Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.


But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.



By Robert Frost

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Sunday, April 28, 2013

28 APRIL 2013: MAGGIE'S POETRY SELECTION FOR YOUR PLEASURE

(Seated Mother Goddess flanked by two lionesses from Çatalhöyük, Turkey; Neolithic age about 6000-5500 BCE, today in Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara)

I'm not a girl
    I'm a hatchet
I'm not a hole
    I'm a hole mountain
I'm not a fool
    I'm a survivor
I'm not a pearl
    I'm the Atlantic Ocean
I'm not a good lay
 
    I'm a straight razor
look at me as if you had never seen a woman before
I have red, red hands and much bitterness

 

By Judy Grahn

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