Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Poem for Wednesday


Cri de coeur
By C. Dale Young


The trees are dark and heavy, my love,
heavy with the sound of the locust—
the dead of summer has arrived.

The lane scripts its old questions
carefully down a canyon of trees.
Green, the sunlight shifts

and dims the credibility of things,
and then the pond is a field,
weedy and green, weedy;

the hospital, dirty squares of light
against a background of trees
dark with the sound of the locust.

Sleeping god in an age of plagues,
give us the chance to use the past tense.
Let us, with the charity of middle age, lie:

"Yes, it was all so beautiful..."

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My children and I braved Staples for school supplies. The line was even longer than last year, though it moved somewhat more quickly than I was expecting...I got in line and sent each boy with his list to find what he needed, and I was at the cashier before Daniel finally tracked down dividers he deemed acceptable (he wanted black ones, not beige ones with rainbow tabs...I do not know what to make of this). We also stopped at Best Buy, where I discovered to my delight that both seasons of Dark Angel are on sale for $15.99, and since I had a gift certificate I now own the entire run of the show for almost nothing. Yay! The new Erin Hunter book came out today and I had planned to go get that for Adam, but he was fed up with shopping and very nearly threw a tantrum when I pointed out that we still needed to stop and get a 9 volt battery for the fire alarm so we didn't all end up dead, so we skipped the bookstore for another day.

Wrote a rather funny article about a health care company that thinks it's a good thing if they promise you the redshirt treatment, and tried to find news about Colm Meaney being cast in the US version of Life on Mars -- I love Meaney, but with two Irish actors in the lead roles, why don't they just show the BBC version on ABC? Spent the evening watching Branagh's As You Like It on HBO, which was well acted and visually interesting but full of the anachronisms you'd expect setting the play in 19th century Japan, which makes the setting pretty gimmicky -- it looks like an English fantasy of an Asian forest rather than an actual Asian forest. I like Bryce Dallas Howard but she's not remotely convincing as a boy -- even less than Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love -- and Kevin Kline is rather wasted as Jaques, who despite getting to deliver the "All the world's a stage" soliloquy doesn't really let Kline show his range. Still, worth seeing, if only because it's hard to ruin that play with a halfway decent cast and David Oyelowo is extremely hot as well as a decent Orlando.


A demonstration of spinning and weaving in one of the crafts buildings at the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair.


There was a display of decorated toilets...I know not why, but I like the Spider-Man one.


View up the midway from the crossroads by the barns.


Always one of my favorite aspects of any amusement park, the haunted house.


When I was younger, these were my favorite part of the fair, but since I have had children something happened in my middle ear and I can't deal with them anymore except as a spectator!


The volunteer fire and rescue teams were there giving safety demonstrations and letting kids climb on the trucks.


This year's award-winning pumpkin.


It is important to know things like this about one's county!

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