White coral bells
Upon a slender stalk
Lilies of the valley
Down my garden walk
Oh, don’t you wish
That you could
hear them ring.
That will happen only
when the fairies sing.
A popular woodland perennial known for its sweetly scented, bell-shaped flowers. These flowers were photographed from our front walk. Planted by the previous owner, their number has diminished with the year, yet a hardy few still persist. Eventually these white flowers will yield orange berries.
It’s Saturday-Saturday! No work for David, at least none that he gets paid for. So, we divided our forces and split the party. Anne and I took Declan to the library. While Dave took Wyatt to the grocery store. This worked out pretty well, except Declan wanted to go to the grocery store too. He also wanted to go to the library but has not learned to replicate himself. Now, that’s a scary thought! On a Saturday morning, its children’s section was doing a pretty good business. We stayed for about two hours, until David called us home. We could have stayed longer, but this boy has a schedule to keep. I’ll leave you with a poem, My Mother Made a Meat Loaf by Jack Prelutsky:
My mother made a meat loaf that provided much distress, she tried her best to serve it, but she met with no success, her sharpest knife was powerless to cut a single slice, and her efforts with a cleaver failed completely to suffice.
She whacked it with a hammer, and she smacked it with a brick, but she couldn’t phase that meat loaf, it remained without a nick, I decided I would help her and assailed it with a drill, but the drill made no impression, though I worked with all my skill.
We chipped at it with chisels, but we didn’t make a dent, it appeared my mother’s meat loaf was much harder than cement, then we set upon the meat loaf with a hatchet and an axe, but that meat loaf stayed unblemished and withstood our fierce attacks.
We borrowed bows and arrows, and we fired at close range, it didn’t make a difference, for that meatloaf didn’t change, we beset it with a blow torch, but we couldn’t find a flaw, and we both were flabbergasted when it broke the power saw.
We hired a hippopotamus to trample it around, but that meat loaf was so mighty that it simply stood its ground, now we manufacture meat loaves by the millions, all year long. they are famous in construction, building houses tall and strong.
The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb is one of a kind, but it is also one of many such one-off museums that populate this city. This museum houses 100+ items, along with their backstory. These stories are sometimes funny, but more frequently sad. After viewing this museum, I was filled with a sense of melancholy, but I also felt at peace and ready to go out and explore the world.
He left it there… for me, That rickety road racer.
He had bought himself a new bike,
And there was no room in his ‘new life’ for the old one…
I looked it over, Tried it out,
Bought special clipless shoes
And raced it round Pajottenland to chase away the blues.
Last week I bought a new one, thinking what the heck,
A carefree singleton like me has no use for that old wreck…
—Danielle, 63 years old
Forevermore—Nevermore
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover and a bee.
And revery
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
Emily Dickinson called her poems blossoms of the brain. More than a third of her poems and half her letters reference flowers. In addition to writing one of her passions was creating herbariums, a systematically arranged collection of dried plants. Pictured is a sampling from the Earthen Door, a photographic re-working of her herbarium. It was created by Dr. Kyra Krakos (and students) and Peter Grima. This show is on display in the Sachs Museum, at the Missouri botanical gardens. In a letter she once wrote, “The career of flowers differ from ours only in audibleness. I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense of transport may surpass our own.”
Meg Merrilies¹
By John Keats
Old Meg she was a Gipsy,
And lived upon the Moors:
Her bed it was the brown heath turf,
And her house was out of doors.
Her apples were swart blackberries,
Her currants pods o’ broom;
Her wine was dew of the wild white rose,
Her book a churchyard tomb.
Her Brothers were the craggy hills,
Her Sisters larchen trees—
Alone with her great family
She lived as she did please.
No breakfast had she many a morn,
No dinner many a noon,
And ‘stead of supper she would stare
Full hard against the Moon.
But every morn of woodbine fresh
She made her garlanding,
And every night the dark glen Yew
She wove, and she would sing.
And with her fingers old and brown
She plaited Mats o’ Rushes,
And gave them to the Cottagers
She met among the Bushes.
Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen
And tall as Amazon:
An old red blanket cloak she wore;
A chip hat had she on.
God rest her aged bones somewhere—
She died full long agone!
Distorted Circles, Jim Wilcox, 1982
Lord Tennyson, the poet, once received a letter and a fraction of shade from Charles Babbage, the mathematician, which read:
In your otherwise beautiful poem, Vision of Sin, there is a verse that reads:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.
It must be manifest that were this true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth the rate of birth is slightly in excess of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem you have it read:
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 ⅙ is born.
Strictly speaking this is not correct. The actual figure is a decimal so long that I cannot get it in on one line, but I believe 1 ⅙ will be sufficiently accurate for poetry…
Vulgar fractions is a term used to designate common fractions. Unicode that!