Poem for Tuesday

In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'
By Thomas Hardy

  I

Only a man harrowing clods
  In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
  Half asleep as they stalk.

  II

Only thin smoke without flame
  From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
  Though Dynasties pass.

  III

Yonder a maid and her wight
  Come whispering by:
War's annals will cloud into night
  Ere their story die.

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Another from Poet's Choice in The Washington Post Book World, in which Robert Pinsky seeks a poet in English with a "melding of folk elements and formal sophistication, brooding fatalism and urbane consciousness" and chooses this 1915 poem. "A long perspective in time, but with vocal immediacy" -- that combination seems to characterize Hardy for Pinsky.

Am paying now for staying up so late last night, as I can barely keep my eyes open after my early-morning wake-up when the kids left to go back to school! They both came home in good moods; older son's best friend, who went to a different middle school, is now in the magnet high school with him so they get to ride the bus together, while younger son's fifth grade teacher finished her M.A. over the summer and is now teaching middle school -- she is his reading teacher, meaning he has her first period every day, which makes him quite happy. So that was good, and Alberto Gonzales putting America out of its collective misery (at least until Bush appoints some other corrupt crony) was also good.

The cats, however, had a difficult day, starting the evening before, when they discovered a pair of katydids in a mating dance on the kitchen window and spent half the night chittering and trying to bat at them, to no avail. Worse, the downstairs toilet died over the weekend and the plumber had to be summoned. The good news for me and the cats here is that the plumber is Irish, funny, a good samaritan (spent the past two weekends doing walking/biking events to raise money for MS) and a friend to cats (he currently has three unexpected kittens, if anyone in the area is looking!) but the bad news is that the cats were not allowed to drink out of the toilet even though he had both the lid and the tank open and it cost over $100 to rebuild everything in the tank.


In my excitement at seeing the Indigo Girls concert, I forgot to try to take photos of Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts.


The wooden building is the Filene Center, which burned down in 1982 (this is how DC-area priorities work: it was the same day Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, and guess which got the top headline on The Washington Post?) This is the audience on the lawn from the back of the orchestra.


These are the cookies that 's friend (I believe it was ) brought that just hypnotized me!


And here is a little birdie in the sun.

Gonzales was knocked out from being the top story here by problems with the Metro that kind of freak me out -- I feel safer flying than in underground tunnels -- and I swear Bush was hoping the pundits would be so busy salivating over Michael Vick that we wouldn't notice the Gonzales business anyway. Ah well, I have to be awake for the lunar eclipse Tuesday morning so I hope I get to enjoy it! Meanwhile, what is wrong with Semagic?