Poem for Thursday

Legend
By Judith Wright

The blacksmith's boy went out with a rifle
and a black dog running behind.
Cobwebs snatched at his feet,
rivers hindered him,
thorn branches caught at his eyes to make him blind
and the sky turned into an unlucky opal,
but he didn't mind.
I can break branches, I can swim rivers, I can stare out
any spider I meet,
said he to his dog and his rifle.

The blacksmith's boy went over the paddocks
with his old black hat on his head.
Mountains jumped in his way,
rocks rolled down on him,
and the old crow cried, You'll soon be dead.
And the rain came down like mattocks.
But he only said,
I can climb mountains, I can dodge rocks, I can shoot an old crow any day,
and he went on over the paddocks.

When he came to the end of the day, the sun began falling,
Up came the night ready to swallow him,
like the barrel of a gun,
like an old black hat,
like a black dog hungry to follow him.
Then the pigeon, the magpie and the dove began wailing
and the grass lay down to pillow him.
His rifle broke, his hat blew away and his dog was gone and the sun was falling.

But in front of the night, the rainbow stood on the mountain,
just as his heart foretold.
He ran like a hare,
he climbed like a fox;
he caught it in his hands, the colours and the cold -
like a bar of ice, like the column of a fountain,
like a ring of gold.
The pigeon, the magpie and the dove flew up to stare,
and the grass stood up again on the mountain.

The blacksmith's boy hung the rainbow on his shoulder
instead of his broken gun.
Lizards ran out to see, snakes made way for him,
and the rainbow shone as brightly as the sun.
All the world said, Nobody is braver, nobody is bolder,
nobody else has done
anything equal to it. He went home as easy as could be
with the swinging rainbow on his shoulder.

--------

Another poem from chaosmanor. There was a quarter inch of snow on the ground when my kids left for school in the morning and it continued to accumulate all day. I love snow but I hate driving in it, so since gblvr couldn't make it to lunch anyway, I had a quiet morning at home working on my new laptop to install VLC Media Player, Audacity and various other things I hadn't gotten around to yet. (I keep meaning to rant about Facebook's Beacon affiliation, which makes even the latest insanity at LiveJournal seem less infuriating -- well, except that Facebook is free so I have no investment there -- and hangingfire put up a post linking to BlockSite which I hadn't known about.) Now, I know I have asked this before and I think melina123 answered me but I can't find it, so I will ask again: does anyone have a recommendation for an AVI converter to burn to DVD? Must such a file be turned into an MPG first? And is the sound getting out of sync inevitable?


A squirrel eating berries in the tree outside my house that's covered with blossoms in the spring.


The bushes in my front yard...


...a flag on the neighbor's deck...


...a nearby street that sat unplowed all afternoon.


Rosie preferred to curl up with a toy fishie...


...while Daisy demonstrated her ownership of the scratching pad that the cats got for Chanukah.

My afternoon consisted of heated arguments with children about keeping their grades up, in and around getting them bundled up to go sledding, rearranging a whole bunch of stuff in my bedroom to move older obsessions out and newer obsessions in (my Lord of the Rings Barbies are now more dramatically displayed than ever before, which is kind of weird at this late date), and doing laundry that will have to be folded in the morning. Evening entertainment was jelly donuts for Chanukah (which was always my preferred spelling of all the options but people online overwhelmingly seem to prefer Hanukkah, which throws me), plus Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End which was a family gift for the holiday this evening and just as awesome as ever. Thursday the kids are likely to have a delayed opening for school so who knows if I will be able to get much done!