Poem for Monday

A Thanksgiving
By Lucy Larcom

For the wealth of pathless forests,
Whereon no axe may fall;
For the winds that haunt the branches;
The young bird's timid call;
For the red leaves dropped like rubies
Upon the dark green sod;
For the waving of the forests,
I thank thee, O my God!

For the sound of waters gushing
In bubbling beads of light;
For the fleets of snow-white lilies
Firm-anchored out of sight;
For the reeds among the eddies;
The crystal on the clod;
For the flowing of the rivers,
I thank Thee, O my God!

For the rosebud's break of beauty
Along the toiler's way;
For the violet's eye that opens
To bless the new-born day;
For the bare twigs that in summer
Bloom like the prophet's rod;
For the blossoming of flowers,
I thank Thee, O my God!

For the lifting up of mountains
In brightness and in dread;
For the peaks where snow and sunshine
Alone have dared to tread;
For the dark of silent gorges,
Whence mighty cedars nod;
For the majesty of mountains,
I thank Thee, O my God!

For the splendor of the sunsets
Vast mirrored on the sea;
For the gold-fringed clouds, that curtain
Heaven's inner mystery;
For the molten bars of twilight,
Where thought leans, glad, yet awed;
For the glory of the sunsets,
I thank thee, O my God!

For the earth, and all its beauty;
The sky, and all its light;
For the dim and soothing shadows
That rest the dazzled sight;
For unfading fields and prairies,
Where sense in vain has trod;
For the world's exhaustless beauty,
I thank Thee, O my God!

For an eye of inward seeing;
A soul to know and love;
For these common aspirations,
That our high heirship prove;
For the hearts that bless each other
Beneath Thy smile, Thy rod;
For the amaranth saved from Eden,
I thank Thee, O my God!

For the hidden scroll, o'erwritten
With one dear Name adored;
For the Heavenly in the human;
The Spirit in the Word;
For the tokens of Thy presence
Within, above, abroad;
For Thine own great gift of Being,
I thank Thee, O my God!

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Another by Larcon, from yesterday's Poet's Choice. I see what Robert Pinsky means when he says that she's nothing like her contemporaries Whitman and Dickinson, unfortunately!

Though we did many things Sunday, including walking through sections of the National Arboretum to see how it looks in late fall and watching Desperate Crossing, the Mayflower colony reenactment on the History Channel, the only one that really mattered to my children is this one:


My children demonstrate the proper position for playing baseball on the Wii. Older son slept over a friend's house so that at 6 a.m. they could go stand in line at Best Buy with the friend's mother. Apparently they had a good time and chatted with lots of twentysomething gamers and one grandmother who was in line to get a Wii for her grandchildren; there was nothing like the PS3 riots.


And here the kids demonstrate the follow-through. The VR stuff is really very cool. The cordless controllers are really awesome -- no more pile of tangled wires on the floor. And the Wii itself is so small, even compared to a GameCube!


Son #1 shows off the number written on his wrist to indicate his number in line at 7:30 a.m. They did this instead of handing out tickets so no one could steal a ticket from anyone else.

So older son got his Wii, went back to his friend's house to play for awhile, then we picked him while retrieving younger son from Hebrew school, fed everyone lunch and went to the arboretum -- first the bonsai exhibit, then the National Capitol Columns, then we drove and parked near the Anacostia overlook and hiked up there. It was gorgeous, overcast and cool, and we were thinking of going from there to Huntley Meadows since we haven't been for ages, but it started to drizzle a bit and boys were itching to get home so younger son could try out the Wii.

We stopped at the mall first, though, so younger son could get the Wii Happy Feet game which Best Buy had not had it in stock yet, and wandered down to the See's Candy kiosk since they were clearly giving out samples (crispy mints mmmmm), and since the kiosk was right in front of Bath & Body Works and I had a Free Item coupon, what could I do but get one of those fabulous-smelling Aspen candles and eggnog Wallflower refills? and I watched the Mayflower reenactment ourselves, since the kids were not going to be torn away from their new toy and they had to go to bed by 9:30 anyway (really older son probably should have been thrown in bed at 8 as he had lost his voice from a morning standing out in the cold). But before that I typed up my George Takei interview, which in some ways is not as interesting as my previous interview with him from when Mulan came out, but then he specifically did not want to talk about Star Trek (having talked it to death) whereas this time he was obligated to hype the animated series.

As of this afternoon, Yahoo! said that Happy Feet was edging Bond at box office, but they were so close that the adult crowd Sunday night could have put Casino Royale over the top. Meanwhile I know I am supposed to be hysterical about Peter Jackson announcing that he's not directing The Hobbit, but at the risk of infuriating and breaking my last ties with my friends from LOTR fandom, I am far beyond caring. I thought his last two films were bloated and self-indulgent -- more than that, really, though I made lots of excuses for The Two Towers at the time because the things I liked, which mostly had to do with casting and performances, far outweighed the things I did not, and I am beginning to regret that I defended movie!Faramir so passionately when it's pretty clear to me now at least that what I liked was David Wenham and not a character who was all but excised from his own biggest scenes so Jackson and his team could show off their gimmicks.

New Line backed him and gave him the money to film the movies he wanted instead of an abbreviated duology, despite the risk of bankrupting the studio if the films failed, and he made over $200 million from the films, and now he's throwing a tantrum because he thinks the bazillion overmarketed toys and tie-ins that have turned Tolkien from literature to a Trekkie-type industry could have made even more money. (And I still want to hear Howard Shore's score for King Kong.) I don't blame the studio for wanting a different director and I suspect I will bring less baggage to watching The Hobbit by a different director. Alfonse Cuaron, say, would be fine with me, even though I somehow recovered from his absence from HP 4 and 5 without threatening to boycott the franchise forever.