Poem for Tuesday and Downtown Ducklings

Sita
By Jason Schneiderman

Do you remember Sita? How when Hanuman came to rescue her
she refused, how she insisted that Rama come openly,
defeat her captor Ravana openly? She had no desire for stealth,
no desire for intrigue, and though Ravana could not touch her
for the curse on his flesh, she remained captive until Rama came.
Do you remember that she was tortured? That Hunaman asked her
for permission to kill the women who had tortured her? Do you
remember how she walked through fire to prove her purity,
even though everyone knew of the curse on Ravana? How the people
said the fire didn't matter because Fire was the brother of her mother,
Earth? How Rama was as weak in the face of his people as he
had been strong in the face of Ravana? Can you imagine the eyes
of Sita when she refused another test? When she looked at Rama,
a man she loved enough to die for, a man who was a god, and knew
it was over? Can you imagine her eyes in that moment, as she asked
her mother to take her back, to swallow her back into the earth? I think
my eyes are like that now, leaving you.

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Blessed Beltane! I had a bunch of major and minor work to do Monday that I put off till after lunch to finish reading the mediocre book I'd been reading in the car on my Kindle over the weekend -- fine, it was My Jane Austen Summer, which someone gave me as a gift and which had some cute moments but was overall sloppy, unpolished and rather mean-spirited toward the very people with whom the narrator claimed to identify, like Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. I keep meaning to type up voluminous notes on three huge biographies of Edward VIII and George VI but the task is daunting; at least on the Kindle, when I want to remember a line, I can clip it and save it without having to type it out.

Adam brought Maddy home after school -- he hadn't seen her in several days, she was at a religious retreat -- and she had dinner with us. We watched part of the Orioles game as they blew it to the Yankees again, then we watched Smash, which made me really miss the characters from the beginning of the season, most of whom were nominally adults; now I feel like I might as well pay more attention to Glee, since the character maturity level is about the same and at least the kids on Glee are SUPPOSED to act like teenagers. Here are some photos of the ducklings that were in the fountain at the National Museum of the American Indian, plus the momma duck who nearly abandoned half of them to head to the pond before a drake chased her back to them: