Poem for Tuesday

A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning
By John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
  And whisper to their souls to go;
While some of their sad friends do say,
  Now his breath goes, and some say, No;

So let us melt, and make no noise,
  No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
’Twere profanation of our joys
  To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears
  Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidations of the spheres,
  Though greater far, are innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love,
  Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence; for that it doth remove
  Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so far refined,
  That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
  Careless, eyes, lips and hands to miss,

—Our two souls therefore, which are one,
  Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
  Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixt foot, makes no show
  To move, but doth if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
  Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circles just,
  And makes me end where I begun.

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LOTR always puts me in mind of that poem. Am still not caught up, nor close to caught up, and today I have to undergo torture in the form of the Yu-Gi-Oh movie, to which I promised to take my children since their grandparents are coming down from Pennsylvania tomorrow and they have orientation at school on Thursday. Sigh. In consolation it is a free chips and queso day at California Tortilla, so I get to go out to lunch with my family first.

My younger son, who is going into third grade, has been selected to be in a 2-3 combination class next year. That sounded at first like bad news, as the older kids in combination classes sometimes suffer, but it is being taught by my younger son's wonderful wonderful second grade teacher who is the reason that he is going to a magnet middle school, because she realized that I was not making up his mathematical abilities and really challenged him. Also, the younger one is so used to being the youngest and acting like the youngest that it may be good for him to be in a potential mentoring position. So I am thinking this could be a very good thing.

What photos I could get of the exhibit that aren't actually of the exhibit, as photography in the exhibit was prohibited: