Because I adore poetry by Czeslaw Milosz
 

A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto
Bees build around red liver,
Ants build around black bone.
It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks,
It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam
Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals.
Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls
Engulfs animal and human hair.

Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs,
Ants build around white bone.
Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax,
Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire.
The roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations.
Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down,
With one leafless tree.

Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way,
With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.
He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,
He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,
The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum.
Bees build around a red trace.
Ants build around the place left by my body.

I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.
He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch
Who has sat much in the light of candles
Reading the great book of the species.

What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.

Warsaw, 1943
By Czeslaw Milosz from "Selected Poems", 1973
Translated by Czeslaw Milosz
© Czeslaw Milosz

“If you get to thinking you are a person of some influence, try ordering somebody else’s dog around."

Will Rogers

My Heaven

Nothing shatters nothing breaks
Nothing hurts nothing aches
We've got ourselves one hell of a place .. in my heaven
Looking down at the world below
A bunch of whinning, fighting schmo's
Up here we've got non of those .. in my heaven

There's pools and lakes and hills and mountains
Music, art and lighted fountains
Who needs money here, no one's counting .. in my heaven
No one works, we all just play
We pick the weather everyday
If you change your mind, well that's ok .. in my heaven

Grandma's up here, grandpa too
In a condo with to die for view
There's presidents and movie stars
You just come as you are
No one's lost and no one's missing
No more fighting just hugs and kissing
And all these stars are just wishing .. in my heaven

There's little white lights everywhere
Your childhood dog in dad's old chair
And more memories than your heart can hold
When Sting's singing "Fields of Gold"
There's neighbours, thieves and long lost lovers
Villains, poets, Kings and mothers
Up here we forgive eachother .. in my heaven

For every soul that's down there waiting,
Holding on still hesitating
We say a prayer of levitating .. in my heaven
You can look back on your life's lot
But it can't matter what your not
By the time your here we are all you've got
In my heaven

Indeed.

Glynn

Spike Lee
 

Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won't come in.(f)

Alan Alda
American, Actor Quotes

As in all moral panics, an accusation is enough to destroy a person's life. Hysteria trumps evidence. (f)

~ Carol Tavris

It's no use of talking unless people understand what you say...
zora neale hurston

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom. --Marcel Proust