Poem for Saturday

Knowledge
By D.M. Davin

God blazed in every gorsebush
When I was a child;
Forbidden fruits were orchards
And the flowers grew wild.

God is a shadow now,
The gorse blooms pale;
Branches in the orchard bow
With fruit grown stale.

My father was a hero once
Now he is a man;
The world shrinks from infinity
To my fingers' span.

Why has the mystery gone
Where is the spell?
I live sadly now;
Once I lived well.

--------

Went to the gastroenterologist, who had good news for me: I don't have an ulcer, I don't have H. pylori, I don't have duodenal malabsorption. He showed me some very charming (read: disgusting) photos of the lining of my esophagus and stomach, which was very red and swollen in one area but there was no evidence of a tear. He isn't sure why I was throwing up blood, but he doesn't think it is likely to recur. Still, he wants me on Nexium for a few months and the no-caffeine, no-alcohol, no-spicy-food dictum stands at least until he sees me again in a month. So I am relieved, but also beginning to envision the day when I will be craving curry with at our favorite Indian restaurant and wailing because I can't have it. How do you feel about going out for baked chicken sandwiches, sweetie? *g*

Here is my review of "The City On the Edge of Forever", probably not sufficiently profound given that this is probably the single most important hour of Star Trek. And speaking of Star Trek, something happened to me today that has not happened in ages: I got angry mail from a Janeway fan! Apparently in my reviews I demanded that she be a role model when she in fact represents the yin-yang in all of us, the darkness and the light, every woman's fear that she can never succeed as well as her desire to be a housewife or something like that (English was clearly not the writer's first language). She also helpfully provided me with a definition of feminism (hers) and proceeded to explain where I had missed the mark. Ooh, I haven't heard this kind of veiled hostility in the name of feminism since I quit KMAS!

In other entertaining fandom news, though probably everyone has already seen it -- I got it off the TrekBBS -- apparently J.K. Rowling doesn't exist! Once I got done laughing at this I found it phenomenally depressing. Yeah, because of course no single mother could accomplish all that she did. Sometimes I get all irritated at Rowling for the way she writes female characters and erases her own previous homoerotic subtext and stuff, but then I read something like this and want to defend her, so maybe it really is all a giant media conspiracy. Now I just want to know where I audition to become the next fake famous writer and live in a castle and meet Alan Rickman.

Will be busy all day with in-laws, will look for Maximus in the morning during his happy stomping hours, will watch everyone else eat mother-in-law's birthday dinner which I will only be able to admire from a distance. Have a lovely weekend everyone!


Tiberias, on the the Sea of Galilee, was a center of Jewish life in the third century. The hot springs of Hammat, south of the city, were excavated in the 1960s, which is when the original of this mosaic was found in a third-century synagogue. This reconstruction of Hammat Tiberias is at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. (The photo is from early 2002, after I got my digital camera but before I got a LiveJournal.)