Poem for Saturday

Rain
By Jack Gilbert

Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And the browns gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.

I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.

--------

I had a quiet Walpurgisnacht and a rather uneventful Beltane in both a traditional and Jonathan Coulton sense. Slept later than I intended -- still recovering from migraine, plus it's hard to get out of bed with three cats holding the covers down. Then spent much too much of the morning organizing things at Dreamwidth and subscribing/granting access to the influx of people who joined overnight, which in some cases required figuring out whose new username went with which familiar one. I was planning to have lunch with Gblvr, who was dealing with car problems all morning, but by the time she got down to my area, it was late enough that I was afraid I'd be late to pick up Adam in the rain, so we postponed. Before and after that, I wrote a fairly low-key review of Next Gen's "In Theory".

This week's Fannish5: Name 5 dead characters you'd like to see resurrected. Please note that I hate miraculous resurrections and do NOT want to see these in canon -- every time someone comes back from the dead, it cheapens the idea of death, so that on shows like Heroes, I no longer feel anything when someone dies. That said, these are the characters I most wish had had more time. Snape is not on this list because the evidence of his death is too flimsy for me to believe; if Rowling wanted to write a sequel with him in it, she could bring him back in a single sentence. Captain Kirk is not on this list because Shatner did bring him back in a single sentence, or very nearly.
1. Boromir, The Lord of the Rings
2. Damar, Deep Space Nine
3. Tasha Yar, Star Trek: The Next Generation
4. Teresa Moreno, Sharpe
5. Simon Donovan, The West Wing

Last week's Fannish5: Name five imaginary places you would like to go on vacation.
1. Avalon, The Mists of Avalon
2. The Lost Land, The Dark Is Rising
3. Lothlorien, The Lord of the Rings
4. The Wormhole/Celestial Temple, Deep Space Nine
5. Waponi Woo, Joe vs. the Volcano


Soup tureens at Winterthur's Campbell Collection, made by Johann Sebastian Wurth in Austria in the late 1700s.


Porcelain bowl from Meissen Porcelain Factory, Germany, 1740s.


Zacharias Deichmann's gunship tureen, made in St. Petersburg in 1766 with Romanov insignia.


Head of cabbage with frog earthenware tureen from the Philippe Mombaers Factory in Brussels in the 1750s.


Tureen depicting a bear hunt made by Anton Michelsen in Copenhagen, 1866.


Rabbit tureens from the Chelsea Porcelain Factory circa 1755 and a silver gilt tureen by John Bridge, also in London, from the late 1820s.


Faience boar's head tureen made in Kiel in Holstein, then part of Denmark, now in Germany.


A tureen from Jingdezhen, China, probably made in the 1770s, bearing the coat of arms of the Sobral family of Portugal.

Adam made me get on Pokeplushies so I could get one of these:


Click here to feed me a Time Vortex!
Get your own at PokePlushies!

We had dinner with my parents, then came home so Daniel could study for his math SAT achievement test tomorrow morning. I put on Jesus Christ Superstar because he said music didn't bother him and we all know it very well (and we missed our annual Easter viewing, though I suppose it's sacrilegious to watch on Beltane, or maybe the other way around). Saturday we all have to get up very early -- Daniel for the test, Adam to go with a friend to a wildlife preserve, myself and Paul to volunteer as ushers for another child's Bar Mitzvah at the temple -- so I must go collapse.