Poem for Thursday

Epitaph
By Eric Pankey

Beyond the traceries of the auroras,
The fires of tattered sea foam,
The ghost-terrain of submerged icebergs;
Beyond a cinder dome's black sands,
Beyond peninsula and archipelago,
Archipelago and far-flung islands,
You have made of exile a homeland,
Voyager, and of that chosen depth, a repose.

The eel shimmers and the dogfish darts,
A dance of crisscrosses and trespasses
Through distillate glints and nacreous silts,
And the sun, like fronds of royal palm
Wind-torn, tossed, lashes upon the wake,
But no lamplight mars or bleaches your realm,
A dark of sediment, spawn, slough, and lees,
Runoff, pitch-black, from the rivers of Psalms.

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Again a distracted post while watching the World Series -- how did I start caring, when I haven't even lived in Chicago for more than ten years? Partly it's not just that I want Chicago to win but I want Houston to lose. Last World Series I was so happy that the Yankees had fallen, it seemed almost anticlimactic, but I hate the Astros as much as the Braves and more than the Giants! I even missed Veronica Mars and didn't "miss" it.

Had a birthday lunch with ...okay, so I was more than ten days late for her birthday, I tried! But I hadn't seen her in ages so it was lovely, and we had tom ka gai and pad see ew which always make me very happy. Spent the afternoon helping kids with homework (well, the younger one; I can no longer help the other one with math) and writing with which is an addictive habit. *g* (Not even crackfic! Real fic!) Five days till NaNo and I am thinking, November is such a stupid month for this, I have family coming for Thanksgiving, I have school and holiday stuff to deal with, who picked November rather than January anyway, arrgh, it's not worth it. But I reserve the right to change my mind, again.

Y'all remember what I said about how I would take people who were loudly and vocally anti-choice off my friends list and good riddance? That goes TEN TIMES for people who want to defend the poor innocent Iranian president for calling for Israel to be wiped off the map. I go batshit when I read headlines like "Iran Has Tough Words For Israel". Can you imagine if any country had called for the annihilation of the United States on grounds of imperialism and a newspaper called it merely "tough words"? ("The establishment of the State of Israel was an act of aggression" -- much less so than the establishment of the colonies by European invaders of North America from which the United States arose. Raise your hand if you're from a spot in the world whose population has never in history been culpable when accusations of imperialism started flying.) I am already sick of listening to oh so politically correct leftists rationalize how Israel's fury at these remarks is just an excuse for Bush to make more war in the Middle East; to those people I say, you can take your anti-Semitic rantings and go where I don't have to listen. (And no, you can't be the sort of anti-Zionist who believes Israel should be wiped off the map without being an anti-Semite. The Jews living in Israel were not involved in the Balfour Declaration, the UN vote of 1948 or the process to partition the British Mandate of Palestine. Many of them are the descendants of Holocaust survivors and Eastern European Jews who literally had nowhere else to go.) You know that saying about how if you want peace you must work for justice? There is no justice in defending anything about a government that promotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and calls for genocide. Read your history books.

Wow. Some rants really are necessary. Sorry if that was really incoherent; I read some crap and I was too mad to be articulate. And while I was ranting, the White Sox won the World Series! Whooo! Icon from , isn't it great? ST:TMP, that most underrated of K/S films!


Cinnamon grooms . She never does this to me, but every time he lays down on the floor to read or sits back on the couch, she comes over and licks and bites his hair, holding his head still if necessary with her paws. *g*