In Memoriam Paul Celan
By Edward Hirsch
Lay these words into the dead man's grave
next to the almonds and black cherries---
tiny skulls and flowering blood-drops, eyes,
and Thou, O bitterness that pillows his head.
Lay these words on the dead man's eyelids
like eyebrights, like medieval trumpet flowers
that will flourish, this time, in the shade.
Let the beheaded tulips glisten with rain.
Lay these words on his drowned eyelids
like coins or stars, ancillary eyes.
Canopy the swollen sky with sunspots
while thunder addresses the ground.
Syllable by syllable, clawed and handled,
the words have united in grief.
It is the ghostly hour of lamentation,
the void's turn, mournful and absolute.
Lay these words on the dead man's lips
like burning tongs, a tongue of flame.
A scouring eagle wheels and shrieks.
Let God pray to us for this man.
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Am so enjoying that poetry meme -- lots of stuff I've never seen before and some favorites in other people's journals. This one is by the poet who writes the Poet's Choice column I link to every Sunday from The Washington Post. I knew him as a poet before I knew he was a teacher (was assigned For the Sleepwalkers for a poetry writing seminar at Penn, for Daniel Hoffman's class I believe -- another wonderful poet-teacher). Hirsch's columns are surprisingly upbeat to me because a lot of his poetry is so sad and painful.
Happy birthday
Have had a strange day: had to wait in the house all morning for a plumber because our basement sink backed up again.. This is the laundry sink, but apparently the pipe beneath it gets drainage from all the other sinks in the house, including the kitchen, and somehow it had grease and rotting foodstuffs backing up into it and exploding through the pipe into the sink after a lot of wash water went through. So $300 and a threat of monthly enzyme applications later, that appears to be solved, at least...sigh.
The rest of the day when not busy with kids I devoted to the pages linked off of here. I decided I was tired of not being able to show my photos to anyone to whom I did not want to give this journal URL, like my parents, so I reproduced and reformatted a lot of the pages from journal entries. Now I need a nicer index page (and probably a nicer indexing system), and I am sure I am missing lots of photos that were never in my memories. And I still need to do something with the photos from our trip west in 2003, which are currently not even properly captioned.
From
I leave you all with another mystery from my weekend nature photo shoots. I really need to become a better naturalist!
A big bee-looking insect, except it isn't a bee and it isn't a wasp. Anyone know exactly what it is?
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