Poem for Friday

Wind
By Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up --
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

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Just a quickie as I am visiting with , or rather she is visiting with me (and being driven crazy by my cats, who seem to have a sensor for people who are allergic to them and try to climb all over them, as will attest!) We went to Great Falls, where we saw many herons -- six on one spot! -- and salamanders (including one with a blue tail that I wanted to get a photo of so could tell me if she knew what kind it was, but it was too zippy and ducked under the boardwalk) as well as the expected geese and turtles. Then we went out for Middle Eastern food and came home to watch porn selected scenes from Total Eclipse, Dark Harbor, An Awfully Big Adventure...all right, I showed her Alan Rickman and David Thewlis naked, because if you only remember seeing one thing in Maryland, it should be that!


An unusual sight -- a heron in the canal at Great Falls, Maryland.


One on a rock and one in the air.


Heading out on the rocks to fish.


Two herons fishing...


...and another by the falls.

Then for better or worse she was subjected not only to my children, but to my mother, who had volunteered to take older son shopping for pants to wear to a Bar Mitzvah this weekend to which she and he are going though and I are not. Son REFUSED to model any of the pants and was apparently rather rude, so she bought him clothes that might not have fit and was not terribly pleased. (Nor was son, who apparently had better things to do with his Thursday afternoon than go shopping with Grandma!) Younger son had soccer practice, so some of us watched Sharpe while others went out and got dinner, and then we all watched "The Ultimate Computer" before younger son had a meltdown over my making a joke about boys and bathrooms being a messy mix.

Friday younger son's penguin play is being performed in the afternoon, then older son has Hebrew tutoring. If is completely insane when next she posts, now you will all know why!