Opening Day

In the black hour before dawn,

In the deep dark wood

In beauty sit, surrounded

Nestle at knees of looming

Lace-fringed gypsy trees

Beneath bright night ornaments

See sky jeweled finger-fronds sieve

Wind, shake semaphore

Signals, sough with soft singing

Some last leaves telegraphing

Soft Morse code music.

Squat surrounded on leaf skirts

And surrender to

Beauty  Big Beauty  Beauty

Then night sinks into the soil

Day drops from above

Color and detail expand

Make ordinary

Replace mystery with mundane.

Dark beauty departs

Dark beauty becomes docile

In dawn daylight dons

Different revealing veil.

Come, realize this bounty

These dark tree dances

Waving worship in the wind

Leaf laughter, loose, free.

Such surfeit of bountiful

Beauty unbound and

Repeated on a hundred

Thousand hills.  From our

Hurry hidden in plain view.

November 2010-April2011

Tracks, Bread, Squares, Sonnet

Yesterday Hawthorne and I both could walk a few feet on some areas of the snow crust.  Not this morning.  He could walk, gingerly, but attempts to run were quickly abandoned after his hind end dropped through up to his belly.  Me?  I mostly high-stepped it until we reached the snowmobile trail.  Which was at the end of the walk since I reversed yesterday’s course. A couple deer have followed that snowmobile track, too.  A coyote has crossed the alfalfa waste back and forth.  What was funny were the crow tracks that followed my mostly wind-blown snow hidden yesterday trail through the field; I think they were searching for evidence of rodent activity.  Yesterday there were small rodent, squirrel, and rabbit tracks coming out from the hedgerows into the fields or woods. Oh, and this from Monday:  Some small bird was harvested by a bigger bird.  An owl?  A hawk?  I picked up a wing feather (4.5 inches, gray with white edge) and two smaller breast feathers (gray with reddish brown edge) wondering if i could figure out what kind of bird was eaten.  It is already in the mid-40′sF now.  woo-hoo!

Photos for Kirsty of the bread that is similar, but still not as good as hers.  It crackles as it cools.  It has a wonderful crust.  But still a bit damp inside.

Finally: all caught up and on-time with the Civil War Quilt Squares:

Seven sisters and Log Cabin.

And lastly, but not least, this poem by CS Lewis that I have been thinking of with regard to events in my life and around the world:

SONNET

Dieu a etabli la oriere pour communiquer a ses creatures la dignite de la causalite. –PASCAL

The Bible says Sennacherib’s campaign was spoiled

By angels: in Herodotus it says, by mice–

Innumerably nibbling all one night they toiled

To eat his bowstrings piecemeal as warm wind eats ice.

 

But muscular archangels, I suggest, employed

Seven little jaws at labour on each slender string,

And by their aid, weak masters though they be, destroyed

The smiling-lipped Assyrian, cruel-bearded king.

 

No stranger that onmipotence should choose to need

Small helps than great–no stranger if His action lingers

Till men have prayed, and suffers their weak prayers indeed

To move as very muscles His delaying fingers,

 

Who, in His longanimity and love for our

Small dignities, enfeebles, for a time, His power.

C.S. Lewis

Books from the Bedside

While hunting dust bunnies I decided to cut down on the reading material on the upper level of the stand next to the bed.

Removed for now, mostly because they are (in my mind) “winter reading”:

-The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, selected and arranged by Francis Turner Palgrave

-The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci -Jonathan D. Spence

-Sketches of Home – Suzanne Clark

-The Confessions of St. Augustine

-Gibbon’s Roman Empire, Vol.1

-Poems, Vol.1 - John Masefield

-The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery

-Color – Victoria Finlay  (This one might go back up again)

-The Great Taos Bank Robbery and other Indian Country Affairs - Tony Hillerman

-Unspoken Sermons – George MacDonald

-The Sword and the Stone – T.H. White

-Katerskill Falls – Allegra Goodman (this one I probably will not finish)

-Social Life in The Insect World - J. H. Fabre

Remaining:

Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell

-More Stories to Remember - selected by Thomas B. Costain and John Beecroft

-small antique Vol 1 of  Shakespeare series from my grandfather (Tempest. Two Gent., Com. Errors)

-The White Horse King – Benjamin Merkle

Advent

Last night Isabelle and I played Jesu Parvule and Some Children See Him while the Wednesday night Advent service attenders sang.  I played the pieces like carols, rather quickly, not as choral arrangements.  Jay said they were hard to sing.  The chords are ‘modern’ so maybe that was part of the reason.  Or maybe I played them too fast.

The service was focusing on responses to the coming of the Christ child.  So in between the carols (it is difficult for me to change from the key of B-flat to E in a moment) I read, with appropriate wicked witchiness, Ursula Fanthorpe’s poem

The Wicked Fairy at the Manger

My gift for the child:

No wife, kids, home;
No money sense. Unemployable.
Friends, yes. But the wrong sort –
The workshy, women, wogs,
Petty infringers of the law, persons
With notifiable diseases,
Poll tax collectors, tarts;
The bottom rung.
His end?
I think we’ll make it
Public, prolonged, painful.

Right, said the baby. That was roughly
What we had in mind.

The Wild Strawberries

“She came thousands of miles to get me” she said, “she homeschools me and pays lots of money for lessons and drives me and feeds me and loves me.”

“And in return,” she giggles,  pulling out her hand from behind her back, “I picked her handful of strawberries. So now we are even.”

The girl likes the poem The Lanyard by Billy Collins.

Earlier today, she offered two pennies, then twelve cents, found money.  What a silly.