How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

-  Anne Frank 1929-45

-o0o-

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost 1874-1963

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though; 

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep. 

-o0o-

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

-  Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-82

-o0o-

NEXT POST TUESDAY

"Now that's what I call art" begins again next Wednesday with a series of paintings by the Italian artist Eugene de Blaas

http://nowthatswhaticallart.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Photograph by Jonathan Bowen

This beech tree on Castle Hill at Wittenham Champs in Oxfordshire had the following poem carved on it. It's said that Joseph Tubb 1805-79, who had written the poem, spent two weeks one summer in 1844 completing the carving. Sadly "The Poem Tree" died in the 1990s and collapsed in the summer of 2012

As up the hill with labr'ing steps we tread

Where the twin Clumps their sheltering branches spread

The summit gain'd at ease reclining lay

And all around the wide spread scene survey

Point out each object and instructive tell

The various changes that the land befell

Where the low bank the country wide surrounds

That ancient earthwork form'd old Mercia's bounds

In misty distance see the barrow heave

There lies forgotten lonely Cwichelm's grave.

Around this hill the ruthless Danes intrenched

And these fair plains with gory slaughter drench'd

While at our feet where stands that stately tower

In days gone by up rose the Roman power

And yonder, there where Thames smooth waters glide

In later days appeared monastic pride.

Within that field where lies the grazing herd

Huge walls were found, some coffins disinter'd

Such is the course of time, the wreck which fate

And awful doom award the earthly great.

-o0o-

He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;
Who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children;
Who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;
Who has never lacked appreciation of Earth's beauty or failed to express it;
Who has left the world better than he found it,
Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;
Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had;
Whose life was an inspiration;
Whose memory a benediction.
- Bessie Anderson Stanley 1879-1952

-o0o-

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

- Steve Jobs 1955-2011

-o0o-

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL ART

begins a new series on Wednesday 3rd June with 

Paintings by Eugene de Blaas 1843-1932

http://nowthatswhaticallart.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

from "The Story of a Life" by Konstantin Paustovsky 1892-1968

“Wait, wait, I want to show you something,” he muttered as he fumbled inside his shirt until he pulled out, at last, a little linen bag turned black with sweat, and slipped a much-creased photograph out of it. He blew on it, and handed it to me. A single electric lamp was flickering high up under the ceiling. I couldn’t see a thing.

Then he cupped his hands together, and lit a match. It burned down to his fingers, but he did not blow it out. I looked at the photograph simply in order not to offend the man. I was sure it would be the usual peasant family photograph, such as I had often seen next to the icon in peasant huts.

The mother always sat in front - a dry, wrinkled old woman with knotty fingers. Whatever she was like in life - gentle and uncomplaining or shrewish and foolish - the picture always showed her with a face of stone and with tight-pressed lips. In the flash of the camera’s lens she always became the inexorable mother, the embodiment of the stern necessity of carrying on the race. And around her there always sat and stood her wooden children and her bulging-eyed grandchildren.

You had to look at these pictures for a long time to see and to recognize in their strained figures the people whom you knew well - the old woman’s consumptive, silent son-in-law - the village shoemaker, his wife, a big-bosomed, shrewish woman in an embroidered blouse and with shoes with tops which flapped against the base calves of her legs, a young fellow with a forelock and with that strange emptiness in the eyes which you find in hooligans, and another fellow, dark and laughing, in whom you eventually recognized the mechanic known throughout the whole region. And the grandchildren - frightened kids with the eyes of little martyrs. These were children who had never known a caress or an affectionate greeting. Or maybe the son-in-law who was the shoemaker sometimes took pity on them quietly and gave them his old boot lasts to play with.

-o0o-

The Journey

Mary Oliver b.1935

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice  - 

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do -

determined to save

the only life you could save. 

(In 1983 Mary Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry)

-o0o-

JOHN'S POETRY PAGE
is updated on Saturdays
http://johnspoetrypage.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire. 

-  L. Frank Baum 1856-1919

-o0o-

Minstrel Man

Langston Hughes 1902=67

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

And my throat

Is deep with song,

You do not think

I suffer after

I have held my pain

So long?

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter,

You do not hear

My inner cry?

Because my feet

Are gay with dancing,

You do not know

I die?

-o0o-

from "On Visiting Bookshops" by Christopher Morley 1890-1957

It is a curious thing that so many people only go into a bookshop when they happen to need some particular book. Do they never drop in for a little innocent carouse and refreshment? There are some knightly souls who even go so far as to make their visits to bookshops a kind of chivalrous errantry at large. They go in not because they need any certain volume, but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them. Some wistful, little forgotten sheaf of loveliness, long pining away on an upper shelf - why not ride up, fling her across your charger (or your charge account), and gallop away. Be a little knightly, you book-lovers!

The lack of intelligence with which people use bookshops is, one supposes, no more flagrant than the lack of intelligence with which we use all the rest of the machinery of civilization. In this age, and particularly in this city, we haven’t time to be intelligent.

A queer thing about books, if you open your heart to them, is the instant and irresistible way they follow you with their appeal. You know at once, if you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, one might say), when you have met your book. You may dally and evade, you may go on about your affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the spirit and flavour of the volume, more divined than reasonably noted, will follow you. A few lines glimpsed on a page may alter your whole trend of thought for the day, reverse the currents of the mind, change the profile of the city. The other evening, on a subway car, we were reading Walter de la Mare’s interesting little essay about Rupert Brooke. His discussion of children, their dreaming ways, their exalted simplicity and absorption, changed the whole tenor of our voyage by some magical chemistry of thought. It was no longer a wild, barbaric struggle with our fellowmen, but a venture of faith and recompense, taking us home to the bedtime of a child.

-o0o-

On a Fly drinking out of his Cup
William Oldys 1687-1761

Busy, curious, thirsty Fly,
Gently drink, and drink as I;
Freely welcome to my Cup,
Could'st thou sip, and sip it up;
Make the most of Life you may,
Life is short and wears away.

Just alike, both mine and thine,
Hasten quick to their Decline;
Thine's a Summer, mine's no more,
Though repeated to threescore;
Threescore Summers when they're gone,
Will appear as short as one.

-o0o-

And something very different, to conclude today's post . . .

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -

It gives a lovely light!

- Edna St.Vincent Millay 1892-1950

-o0o-

NEXT POST THURSDAY

Now online
JOHN'S POETRY PAGE
http://johnspoetrypage.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Home Is the Sailor

 A.E. Housman 1859-1936

Home is the sailor, home from sea:

     Her far-borne canvas furled

The ship pours shining on the quay

     The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:

     Fast in the boundless snare

All flesh lies taken at his will

     And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,

     The starlit wave is still:

Home is the sailor from the sea,

     The hunter from the hill.

-o0o-

from "The Haunting of Hill House"

by Shirley Jackson 1916-65

Her face . . .
The men bent half down in wonder.
Her face was white sand sculpture, with a few water drops shimmering on it like summer rain upon a cream-coloured rose. Her face was that moon which when seen by day is pale and unbelievable in the blue sky. It was milk-marble veined with faint violet in the temples. The eyelids, closed down upon the eyes, were powdered with a faint water colour, as if the eyes beneath gazed through the fragile tissue of the lids and saw them standing there above her, looking down and looking down. The mouth was a pale flushed sea-rose, full and closed upon itself. And her neck was slender and white and her breasts were small and white, now covered, uncovered, covered, uncovered, in the flow of water, the ebb of water, the flow, the ebb, the flow. And the breasts were flushed at their tips, and her body was startlingly white, almost an illumination, a white-green lightning against the sand.

And as the water shifted her, her skin glinted like the surface of a pearl.
The lower half of her body changed itself from white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to very pale green, from pale green to emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of cream-water and clear sky merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home.

The woman was the sea, and the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice waters of the other.

-o0o-

All That's Past
 Walter de la Mare 1873-1956

Very old are the woods;
And the buds that break
Out of the brier's boughs,
When March winds wake,
So old with their beauty are -
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose.

Very old are the brooks;
And the rills that rise
Where snow sleeps cold beneath
The azure skies
Sing such a history
Of come and gone,
Their every drop is as wise
As Solomon.

Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
By Eve's nightingales;
We wake and whisper awhile,
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields
Of amaranth lie.

-o0o-

The new blog
JOHN'S POETRY PAGE
is now online and will be updated on Saturday
http://johnspoetrypage.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

'Tis like the birthday of the world,

When earth was born in bloom;

The light is made of many dyes,

The air is all perfume:

There's crimson buds, and white and blue,

The very rainbow showers

Have turned to blossoms where they fell,

And sown the earth with flowers.

- Thomas Hood 1799-1845

-o0o-

Ryokan a Zen master lived alone in a small hut at the foot of a mountain.
One day, on returning to the hut, he discovered a thief inside.
Ryokan grabbed hold of him and said, “You can see that I have no possessions, in fact all I have are the clothes I’m wearing.”
The thief was astonished when Ryokan took off his clothes and handed them to him saying “Please take them as a gift from me.”
Later that night, as Ryokan sat naked watching the moon, he thought “Poor fellow, I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.”

-o0o-

Pansies, lilies, kingcups, daisies,

Let them live upon their praises;

Long as there’s a sun that sets,

Primroses will have their glory;

Long as there are violets,

They will have a place in story;

There’s a flower that shall be mine,

‘Tis the little Celandine.

- William Wordsworth 1770-1850

-o0o-

The Lesser Celadine

-o0o-

If we are peaceful.

If we are happy.

We can smile and blossom

Like a flower.

And everyone

In our family,

Our entire society

Will benefit

From our peace.

-Thich Nhat Hanh b.1926

-o0o-

Now online

JOHN'S POETRY PAGE

at

http://johnspoetrypage.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

OZYMANDIAS

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear -

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

-o0o-

from "One Day" by David Nicholls b.1966

What are you going to do with your life?" In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever; teachers, her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer... "Live each day as if it's your last', that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance. 

-o0o-

Untitled

Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941

I want to give you something, my child,

for we are drifting in the stream of the world.

Our lives will be carried apart,

and our love forgotten.

But I am not so foolish as to hope that

I could buy your heart with my gifts.

Young is your life, your path long, and

you drink the love we bring you at one draught

and turn and run away from us.

You have your play and your playmates.

What harm is there if you have no time

or thought for us.

We, indeed, have leisure enough in old age

to count the days that are past,

to cherish in our hearts what our

hands have lost for ever.

The river runs swift with a song,

breaking through all barriers.

But the mountain stays and remembers,

and follows her with his love.

-o0o-

And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered.

- Nicholas Sparks

-o0o-

Next post here Tuesday

NEW - beginning on Saturday - NEW

JOHN'S POETRY PAGE

http://johnspoetrypage.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the light of the 

candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

- Buddha

-o0o-

Out back, behind the yard

in the brush and scrub at the edge

a world unfolds for those willing

to stop and look, crunch and tread

where squirrel and ant, snake and fox

hunt and work, amongst the deadfall

Wonder of nature in the back, beyond

the cut lawn and past the leaf litter

a bend of a branch held by ivy

a curl of birch bark

a spider’s leg showing below the

lip of a fungus on an old trunk

patterns in the ground, beneath the

newness of spring in the woods

before the full greening of the

new shoots and leaves

in between time in early April

in New Hampshire

- Raymond A. Foss b.1960

-o0o-

The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud, the obstacles of life and its suffering. . . . The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. . . . Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles - sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more kindness and more compassion, we must have the intention to grow as a lotus and open each petal one by one. 

- Goldie Hawn

-o0o-

-o0o-

This blog is now being updated on Tuesdays and Thursdays

NEW - starting on Saturday 9th May - NEW
JOHN'S POETRY PAGE
http://johnspoetrypage.blogspot.com

-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-