"O Blagojevich. O life."

"Down deep they harden fast—they must, so long engrained
in the flesh—in strange, uncanny ways. And so the souls
are drilled in punishments, they must pay for their old offenses.
Some are hung splayed out, exposed to the empty winds,
some are plunged in the rushing floods—their stains,
their crimes scoured off or scorched away by fire.
Each of us must suffer his own demanding ghost."
. . . Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI

"But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were . . ."

“I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and woman spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, `This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.'''

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."

"An Irish temper makes you appreciate Lutherans."

John Updike (1932 - 2009)

"These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt . . ."

“These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt,
and so all their multi-thousand-mile range
is too short for the hope of change.”

from Three Moves, by John Logan

from a poem entitled "Numbers"

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

from Numbers, by Mary Cornish

" . . . Let us, then, be up and doing . . ."

" . . . Let us, then, be up and doing.
With a heart for any fate.
Still achieving, still pursuing
Learn to labor and to wait."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A Poem for Barack Obama

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving,
a young Negro at dawn, in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has plowed,
parting for their President a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while line on one branch,
is a tense court of bespeckled owls and, on the field's
receding rim
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plow continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
til the land lies open like a flag as dawn's sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

- by Derek Walcott

A Year In 40 Seconds

Below you'll find a link to a charming, 40-second video that portrays the progress of a year in the life of a sylvan clearing.

(Please be patient, I haven't yet learned how to post the video image directly to the blog, so there may be a brief commercial at the beginning. I promise the lovely video will begin shortly. Thanks!)

Here is the link:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/index.php?cl=11327764