Poem for Tuesday

The Ruin
By Dafydd ap Gwilym

Nothing but a ruin now
Between moorland and meadow,
Once the owners saw in you
A comely cottage, bright, new,
Now roof, rafters, ridge-pole, all
Broken down by a broken wall.

A day of delight was once there
For me, long ago, no care
When I had a glimpse of her
Fair in an ingle-corner.
Beside each other we lay
In the delight of that day.

Her forearm, snowflake-lovely,
Softly white, pillowing me,
Proffered a pleasant pattern
For me to give in my turn,
And that was our blessing for
The new-cut lintel and door.

Now the wild wind, wailing by,
Crashes with curse and with cry
Against my stones, a tempest
Born and bred in the East,
Or south ram-batterers break
The shelter that folk forsake.

Life is illusion and grief;
A tile whirls off, as a leaf
Or a lath goes sailing, high
In the keening of kite-kill cry.
Could it be our couch once stood
Sturdily under that wood?
Pillar and post, it would seem
Now are less than a dream.
Are you that, or only the lost
Wreck of a fiddle, rune-ghost?

"Dafydd, the cross on their graves
Marks what little it saves,
Says, They did well in their lives."

--------

I spent much of the afternoon with , who came to lunch at the Indian buffet with my husband and children and managed not to cry at the latter's recitation of half of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the first third of HP:HBP. Then she kindly invited me and the kids back to her house so they could play with her cats:


had this fake fishing pole with a shiny multicolored fish at the end, probably filled with catnip, which my kids used to pesk her cats. Here are Jonah and George doing a poor job of feigning disinterest with their demon cat eyes. Incidentally, is having her house repainted, which is why there is plastic on the floor and furniture all askew. I have no such excuses for the state of my living room.


Jonah at the top of the stairs, trying to decide whether it is worth chasing the fish down.


Then Georgie comes around the corner trying to decide whether she should get into the action with Jonah...


...leading to a wild race down the upstairs and the basement stairs, where she gets into pounce position so she can go leaping up after the fish. (Don't you think needs more cat toys? *g*)


Being more mature, Jonah is too cool to be bothered to pounce.


But cats do not play disinterested nearly as well as dogs even when they do not have demon cat eyes.

In the evening my father's brother, his wife and their ten year old arrived at my parents' house from Los Angeles, so we went over to have dessert with them. My uncle's older two daughters from his first marriage, my first cousins, are both having babies -- one had a boy two weeks ago and the other is due three weeks from now -- and we talked to them both on the phone. We have a lot of family in L.A. on both sides of the family (my uncle helped 's brother get his restaurant open) and whenever they are around I get tempted for about five minutes to move out there, until I think about earthquakes and wildfires and Hollywood and Ahhnold being my governor. But it is fun to have them in town; they are taking my kids downtown with them tomorrow, so I will actually get my work done and my laundry folded.

I am writing post-HBP fic. Snupin, even. It is entirely 's fault, as the story was her idea, so I am making her write half of it. Also I am writing it with her because that is the only way I can keep Snape focused on what's happening in the story instead of trying to turn it into mindless porn. Apparently he had a panic attack when he realized his only sexual opportunities in my head following HBP might be with characters whom he apparently finds as disturbing as I do. He seized on the opportunity for a chance with Lupin as soon as she suggested it, and he doesn't care whether I am screaming at him that he is acting OOC or not by demanding smut ASAP. It is nice to know that my Mental Snape has some taste, at least. In the meantime I wrote drabbles: "Unforgivable Curse" for , "Morph" for . Both contain spoilers for HBP.

Wednesday is my son's birthday and my in-laws are coming and my parents are having a big party for all our local relatives since many of them have June and July birthdays. Do I need to buy gifts for all of them? And made my night by saying, "Fleur is HP's equivalent of Seven of Nine," the character who drove us both out of Star Trek fandom. Yes, yes, she is. The nicest thing I can say about Veela is at least we don't see very many of them.