A Tidings of Magpies

Homecoming by Blas Falconer Rain against the roof sounds like a slow tire over gravel, as if a friend has come. The train rumbles through the dark, and my body, tuned to hear you cry before you cry, stirs. The lamp floats in the window, the only window lit at this late hour on the empty street. Your hands unfurl as you fall asleep. Small Clock of Needs, Law that I Abide, the leaves gloss and shine. Like this we rock and sink into the long night of our rocking.

(We saw a flock of birds looking very similiar to this--wild turkeys--after dinner at Grandma PatPat's) Turkeys by Mary Mackey One November a week before Thanksgiving the Ohio river froze and my great uncles put on their coats and drove the turkeys across the ice to Rosiclare where they sold them for enough to buy my grandmother a Christmas doll with blue china eyes I like to think of the sound of two hundred turkey feet running across to Illinois on their way to the platter the scrape of their nails and my great uncles in their homespun leggings calling out gee and haw and git to them as if they were mules I like to think of the Ohio at that moment the clear cold sky the green river sleeping under the ice before the land got stripped and the farm got sold and the water turned the color of whiskey and all the uncles lay down and never got up again please note: photo by Mark Hamilton

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you," that would suffice. --Meister Eckhart

by Ursula Le Guin The holy land is everywhere. —Black Elk Watch where the branches of the willows bend See where the waters of the rivers tend Graves in the rock, cradles in the sand Every land is the holy land. Here was the battle to the bitter end Here's where the enemy killed the friend Blood on the rock, tears on the sand Every land is the holy land. Willow by the water bending in the wind Bent till it's broken and it cannot stand Listen to the word the messengers send Life from the living rock, death in the sand Every land is the holy land. please note: my own photo of the beautiful Ohio near Coney Island

Genius by George Bilgere It was nice being a genius worth nearly half-a-million dollars for the two or three minutes it took me to walk back to my house from the mailbox with the letter from the Foundation trembling in my hand. Frankly, for the first minute I was somewhat surprised at being a genius. I'd only published a few small things at that point. I didn't even have a book. I was just a part-time lecturer at a small mid-western college. But early into the second minute I had fully embraced the fact of my genius. I mean, these people know what they're doing, right? Who am I to tell the Foundation its business? And I was already practicing the kind of modest, Hey, it's no big deal tone of voice I'd be using on the phone for the rest of the day as I called all my friends, and especially my enemies, to treat them to the good news. But when I opened the letter and saw it was merely a request for me to re...

"There is one day that is ours. Thanksgiving Day is the one day that is purely American."     --O Henry I love Thanksgiving. Full disclosure, I love the fall with the change in colors, the chill, and the slowdown to the quiet of winter. I love the annual dog show on television in the morning and the Macy's Parade which jabbers in the background while I read and reread recipes and mince, chop, and slice. I get tired of the kitchen that day, but I enjoy the cooking. It is the day that White Christmas may be dusted off, but I don't want to hear any Christmas music or movies before the day after Thanksgiving. It should be autumn music. A little Yo-Yo Ma, perhaps. Autumn should get it's time and we should take a moment to be grateful before the headlong rush into Commercialmas. IMHO. This year Hubby's working 12hrs, I'm off, HoneyHaired will come home and MissNewOrleans will be in New Orleans. HoneyHaired and I wi...

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow — a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-son...

please note: pictured is the first album I ever bought Ode to the Vinyl Record by Thomas R. Smith The needle lowers into the groove and I'm home. It could be any record I've lived with and loved a long time: Springsteen or Rodrigo, Ray Charles or Emmylou Harris: Not only the music, but the whirlpool shimmering on the turntable funneling blackly down into the ocean of the ear—even the background pops and hisses a worn record wraps the music in, creaturely imperfections so hospitable to our own. Since those first Beatles and Stones LPs plopped down spindles on record players we opened like tiny suitcases at sweaty junior high parties while parents were out, how many nights I've pulled around my desires a vinyl record's cloak of flaws and found it a perfect fit, the crackling unclarity and turbulence of the country's lo-fi basement heart madly spinning, making its big dark sound

"The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." Douglas MacArthur

Not quite as "1 Fish 2 Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" as shown over and over again. please note: map demographic found on FaceBook by Cousin Cole

“People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway. For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."   --attributed to Mother Teresa

   by Ken McCullough What he said was vast, given his limits. At some mojave of the soul, we stopped to gas up, and I was inclined to bolt— wrong look, wrong answer, might raise his demons, but what did I know, who was I to say? He tuned Tom Harmon on the radio, sneered and nodded like a slow woodpecker— "Would that they had broke the mold," he chuckled with sand in his pipes. The sun had stumbled. His eyes turned on me—"What'll it be, rook? Only one of us will walk away, son." He coughed, spat. ''Are you in or are you out? If you think you are fast enough, just once, you might have a blind salamander's chance."

The Fall Almost Nobody Sees by David Budbill Everybody's gone away. They think there's nothing left to see. The garish colors' flashy show is over. Now those of us who stay hunker down in sweet silence, blessed emptiness among red-orange shadblow purple-red blueberry copper-brown beech gold tamarack, a few remaining pale yellow popple leaves, sedge and fern in shades from beige to darkening red to brown to almost black, and all this in front of, below, among blue-green spruce and fir and white pine, all of it under gray skies, chill air, all of us waiting in the somber dank and rain, waiting here in quiet, chill November, waiting for the snow. Well, I don't know what the hell I've been doing for the past month or so. I obviously wasn't here. Biggest change other than the temperature is that we've gone completely to electronic/computerized charting at BigFatTeaching Hospital and I have prett...