Poem for Thursday

To Autumn
By John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

--------

Another swiped from , which I have posted before, but there can never be too much Keats.


Over the church at the Renaissance Faire (where the "Crown Jewels" are kept), the leaves have begun to change.

I have little of note to report from Wednesday...the kids had a half-day of school so I spent it doing chores. First took younger son to violin, then picked up older son and took both kids to dentist...younger son had a loose tooth which the hygienist managed to wiggle free in the course of checking teeth, so I took them out for ice cream afterward (there's this new kind of fluoride that you can eat right after having painted on your teeth, though no hot foods or hard foods for several hours), then had to make a bunch of birthday-related stops to get a new Nintendo DS Mario game, some Pirates of the South China Seas cards, a new violin shoulder rest, milk and toilet paper (plus Cinnamon Toast Crunch and other things that mysteriously appeared in the cart)...anyway, you know how it is.

Kids managed to finish their homework by dinnertime, so after dinner we watched Die Hard 2, the only one of the trilogy I hadn't seen. I don't think it was as good as the first or third -- William Sadler doesn't have the same manic edge for Bruce Willis to work off of, and anyway they're not in direct conflict nearly enough, plus after the first and third movies I was expecting a plot twist that never came -- but my biggest issue, apart from the Pacific Bell telephones in Dulles Airport, was the idea that DC would get that much snow! Before Christmas, yet! And that there would be a big open field with a church that close to the airport, rather than the increasingly thick suburbs, though maybe at the time they made the movie there was slightly less congestion in the area. I was kind of fascinated by the things I noticed that I doubt I would have thought about before 9/11, like the way the plane from England blew up -- it looked fake because that wasn't a plane that had flown over the Atlantic, that was a plane with a full fuel tank. (Sloan from Section 31 killed Miles O'Brien! That amused me, since it wasn't like O'Brien was sleeping with Bashir in Die Harder they were playing characters with certain similarities to the ones they played on DS9.)

When that was over we flipped channels just in time for Barbara Walters interviewing Terri Irwin (Here is coverage of it if you missed it and want highlights). I felt very weird about it...here is a woman who is very obviously grieving, sincerely devastated, and yet I also got the sense that she felt she had to do this for her family and her career, get out there and put herself in front of the cameras to make sure she and Bindi and Robert can keep doing what they'd been doing with Steve, and Barbara Walters pounced like a vulture to be the one to get that exclusive footage and ask Steve's friend what he saw on the videotape when Steve died. It was somehow distasteful and at the same time I can't disagree that it was probably what Steve would have wanted, publicity and donations for the animal park and the animals while the attention is there.

Trek news was yet another reveal-nothing interview about Bethesda Softworks' upcoming games and some blather about fan films -- Koenig got his fifteen minutes of New Voyages, now it's Takei's turn. My throat is still not right and it's still really irritating and weird, because I feel like there's no point in taking allergy medicine when I'm not actually congested. Shall go try to sleep it off.