A Tidings of Magpies

By Frances Cornford The spirits of children are remote and wise, They must go free Like fishes in the sea Or starlings in the skies, Whilst you remain The shore where casually they come again. But when there falls the stalking shade of fear, You must be suddenly near, You, the unstable, must become a tree In whose unending heights of flowering green Hangs every fruit that grows, with silver bells; Where heart-distracting magic birds are seen And all the things a fairy-story tells; Though still you should possess Roots that go deep in ordinary earth, And strong consoling bark To love and to caress. Last, when at dark Safe on the pillow lies an up-gazing head And drinking holy eyes Are fixed on you, When, from behind them, questions come to birth Insistently, On all the things that you have ever said Of suns and snakes and parallelograms and flies, And whether these are true, Then for a while you'll need to be no more That sheltering shore Or le...

By Louis Jenkins The time has come to say goodbye, our plates empty except for our greasy napkins. Comrades, you on my left, balding, middle-aged guy with a ponytail, and you, Lefty, there on my right, though we barely spoke I feel our kinship. You were steadfast in passing the ketchup, the salt and pepper, no man could ask for better companions. Lunch is over, the cheese- burger and fries, the Denver sandwich, the counter nearly empty. Now we must go our separate ways. Not a fond embrace, but perhaps a hearty handshake. No? Well then, farewell. It is unlikely I'll pass this way again. Unlikely we will all meet again on this earth, to sit together beneath the neon and fluorescent calmly sipping our coffee, like the sages sipping their tea underneath the willow, sitting quietly, saying nothing.  My daughter texted yesterday to tell me she and her fiance have lost a dear friend; a member of the small family of loved ones they have collected in New Orleans....

...when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.” ― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations please note: photo from the Common Gettys Collection

the hookers, the madmen and the doomed By Charles Bukowski today at the track 2 or 3 days after the death of the jock came this voice over the speaker asking us all to stand and observe a few moments of silence. well, that's a tired formula and I don't like it but I do like silence. so we all stood: the hookers and the madmen and the doomed. I was set to be dis- pleased but then I looked up at the TV screen and there standing silently in the paddock waiting to mount up stood the other jocks along with the officials and the trainers: quiet and thinking of death and the one gone, they stood in a semi-circle the brave little men in boots and silks, the legions of death appeared and vanished, the sun blinked once I thought of love with its head ripped off still trying to sing and then the announcer said, thank you and we all went on about our busi...

By Jane Hirshfield In Istanbul, my ears three mornings heard the early call to prayer. At fuller light, heard birds then, water birds and tree birds, birds of migration. Like three knowledges, I heard them: incomprehension, sweetened distance, longing. When the body dies, where will they go, those migrant birds and prayer calls, as heat from sheets when taken from a dryer? With voices of the ones I loved, great loves and small loves, train wheels, crickets, clock-ticks, thunder-where will they, when in fragrant, tumbled heat they also leave?

By Amanda Strand The wedding ring I took off myself, his wife wasn’t up to it. I brought the nurse into the room in case he jumped or anything. “Can we turn his head? He looks so uncomfortable.” She looked straight at me, patiently waiting for it to sink in. The snow fell. His truck in the barn, his boots by the door, flagpoles empty. It took a long time for the taxi to come. “Where to?” he said. “My father just died,” I said. As if it were a destination.

Every year when we watch the Oscar ceremonies we see the nominations for the short films and documentaries and say out loud, "WTH??  Who gets to see these films?" And then, the next day or even by the end of the program we've forgotten the whole matter. This year after a particularly cabin-fever inducing snow fall we booted our way up to the village to check out civilization and noticed a flyer on Sitwell's Coffee Shop window with a date and a theater location to watch the Oscar Shorts. Serendipity!! The Cincinnati World Cinema has been doing it for the last 14 years and we're nothing but clueless morons to have missed it all these years. I think you can also buy it on Amazon for instant viewing on your device. But again, techno idjits are we with the attention span of a moth. So short films work well with our distracted brains. The longest film was 39 minutes I believe. The shortest, 3 minutes, give or take a minute or so. Seven films the first day, or t...

From Our House to Your House By Jack Ridl It is 1959. It is the cusp of the coming revolution. We still like Ike. We are still afraid of Sputnik. We read  Life  magazine and  Sports Illustrated where the athletes grow up shooting hoops in the driveway, playing catch in the backyard. We sit on our sectional sofa. My mother loves Danish modern. Our pants have cuffs. Our hair is short. We are smiling and we mean it. I am a guard. My father is my coach. I am sitting next to him on the bench. I am ready to go in. My sister will cheer. My mother will make the pre-game meal from  The Joy of Cooking . Buster is a good dog. We are all at an angle. We are a family at an angle. Our clothes are pressed. We look into the eye of the camera. “Look ‘em in the eye,” my father teaches us. All we see ahead are wins, good grades, Christmas. We believe in being happy. We believe in mowing the lawn, a two-car garage, a freezer, and what the teach...

Sense and Sensibility By Jane Austen " The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance. The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life, had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister. But her death, which happened ten years before his own, produced a great alteration in his home; for to supply her loss, he invited and received into his house the family of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended to bequeath it. In the society of his nephew and niece, and their children, the old Gentleman's days were comfortably spent. His attachment to them all increased. The constant attention of Mr....

may your arrows fly straight and your aim be true." please note: my photo at Spring Grove Cemetery, March 2015

By Jane Kenyon There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon. as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the bas...

The Changing Light by Lawrence Ferlinghetti The changing light             at San Francisco     is none of your East Coast light            none of your                    pearly light of Paris The light of San Francisco              is a sea light                        an island light And the light of fog         blanketing the hills     drifting in at night            through the Golden Gate       ...

The Invention of Heaven                     By Dean Young The mind becomes a field of snow but then the snow melts and dandelions blink on and you can walk through them, your trousers plastered with dew. They’re all waiting for you but first here’s a booth where you can win a peacock feather for bursting a balloon, a man in huge stripes shouting about a boy who is half swan, the biggest pig in the world. Then you will pass tractors pulling other tractors, trees snagged with bright wrappers and then you will come to a river and then you will wash your face.

Dawn Revisited By Rita Dove Imagine you wake up with a second chance: The blue jay hawks his pretty wares and the oak still stands, spreading glorious shade. If you don’t look back, the future never happens. How good to rise in sunlight, in the prodigal smell of biscuits – eggs and sausage on the grill. The whole sky is yours to write on, blown open to a blank page. Come on, shake a leg! You’ll never know who’s down there, frying those eggs, if you don’t get up and see. There's nothing like the sun crystallizing off the snow piles on each side of our driveway necessitating sunglasses, don't you know, to get a girl up and moving. The exile to the grey and frozen tundra of another CinCity winter is soon at an end. My money's down on seeing someone in shorts today. Outside. A six-pack of Ale 8 on the line. I've taken a break from this blog for a while. Long story and plenty of time to tell it, but believe it's a good time to return. The world stil...