Mockingbirds are poets, too.
It's Sol's day … The mailbox survived the downpour and winds of overnight thunderstorms and tornadoes – it is April, after all – which have moved out of TulseyTown for the time being. Lots of flotsam and jetsam left behind.
A noteworthy follower of The Way, Norwegian ethnologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and a small crew set sail on this date from Peru aboard the primitive raft Kon-Tiki and arrived in Polynesia three and a half months later.
The poet, Carolyn Forché is celebrating her 74th birthday today. The Michigander and “poet of witness” was born in 1950 Detroit.
Its the 107th birth anniversary of Robert Anderson. The playwright and multiple Academy Award film nominee was born in 1917 New York City.
Alice Waters turns 80 today.. The chef, restaurateur, and author was born in 1944 Chatham Borough, New Jersey. In 1971, she opened Chez Panisse, a restaurant in Berkeley, California, famous for its role in creating the farm-to-table movement and for pioneering California cuisine.
And the novelist Harper Lee was born on this date in 1926 Monroeville, Alabama. She wrote just one novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, but at last count has sold more than 30 million copies.
"No one is a great poet because she is a miserable drunk. No one is a great poet because he has had a nervous breakdown. Suffering, however, can be experienced as a curse or a blessing; the luckiest is the one who can experience it as a blessing." – Carolyn Forché
The Man Who Would Be King
It's Freya's day . . . more poetry blowing into the mailbox watched by a strange looking rabbit with very long ears . .
Spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,
shoulders and all the rest. It could float, of course,
but would rather plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs the metaphor of the body.
– Mary Oliver, Dream Work, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986
While dodging raindrops this stormy morning I found several dates I missed yesterday. . . .
Ted Kooser turned 85 yesterday. The poet laureate was born in 1939 Ames, Iowa.
The author of over 10,000 “Uncle Wiggily” stories, Howard R. Garis, was also born 151 years ago yesterday on this date in 1873 Binghamton, New York. Uncle Wiggily was a regular visitor to the nighttime bed-before-sleep, read by my father to my brother and I in our shared bedroom.
The "First Lady of Song," Ella Fitzgerald, was born in 1917 Newport News, Virginia, 107 years ago yesterday.
Yesterday in 1959, one of the largest civil engineering feats ever undertaken, the St. Lawrence Seaway officially opened. It links the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes.
417 years ago today, the first permanent English settlers in North America landed at Cape Henry, Chesapeake Bay in 1607.
“The framers [of our Constitution] did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to; there were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They didn’t provide immunity to the president. And, you know—not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?” – U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan during the immunity arguments yesterday.
Abandoned Farmhouse
He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
. . . Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
. . . strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.
– Ted Kooser, "Abandoned Farmhouse" from Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems. Zoland Books, 1980.
Bird brain dreams
It's Thors day . . . and the mailbox is attracting Strong Southerlies with connections to the great mysteries .
Earth Day is now everyday . . . Heather Cox Richardson suggests it should be . . .
When was the last time your doctor was taken out for dinner by big broccoli? It’s probably been a while.
If you put vitamins in a can of Classic Coca-Cola would it then become “good for you?”
The more one tries to control and measure the world, the more one experiences fear and apprehension. – Primoz Korelc Hiriko
Birds dream. Quite possibly that may be what it means to be alive.
Poetry connects us to the mystery. – Jack Kornfield
Poetry arrived in search of me.
I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
… there I was without a face
and it touched me.
… image of mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
… my heart broke free on the open sky.
– Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems, Delacorte Press, 1970
Everybody's wonderin' where they all came from . . .
Everybody's wonderin' where they're gonna go
When the whole thing's done.
But no one knows for certain
And so it's all the same to me
I think I'll jus' let the mystery be