Poem for Friday

The Poem That Can't Be Written

is different from the poem
that is not written, or the many

that are never finished—those boats
lost in the fog, adrift

in the windless latitudes,
the charts useless, the water gone.

In the poem that cannot
be written there is no danger,

no ponderous cargo of meaning,
no meaning at all. And this

is its splendor, this is how
it becomes an emblem,

not of failure or loss,
but of the impossible.

So the wind rises. The tattered sails
billow, and the air grows sweeter.

A green island appears.
Everyone is saved.

     -- Lawrence Raab

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Back from a very nice evening at Daniel's back to school night, which started early -- a 4:30 departure, since there was a car on fire on the Beltway causing lane closures and we knew traffic would be bad. We left Adam with my mother and picked up Daniel after robotics, then took him across the street from his school to the Chinese restaurant where he eats sometimes with the robotics team, though he tried to pretend he wasn't with us while we were walking and fled the moment we were done eating to go hang out with his friends in the chorus classroom, since he was going to sing with them in a bit. Meanwhile, I stopped in Tuesday Morning and discovered the Red Riding Hood Barbie on sale for $20, so it was a very successful abandonment for me, since Daniel would never have put up with me forcing him into a store!

Daniel had warned us that his math teacher was a comedian and his history teacher was a cynic, though we discovered that both are shows put on for students -- he seems to have terrific teachers in every subject this year (the computer science teacher wasn't there, but he had her first semester last year and liked her). The marine biology teacher is very young and enthusiastic and wants to take field trips to the aquarium and Natural History Museum, the history teacher was wearing a tie with the cover of The Origin of Species printed on it and a Darwin fish pin and wants to take a field trip to see the Xian terra cotta warriors at National Geographic, the math teacher said that when kids are struggling with advanced calculus, they need cookies. The chorus trip in the spring is likely to be to Florida. Daniel seems to be quite happy despite all the homework, so it's all good.


A calf and a chicken share a stall at South Mountain Creamery.


The poultry -- chickens, turkeys, guineafowl -- is free-range and wanders around the farm...


...but when they get tired or cold, they hunker down with the cows.


They have also been known to share the calves' feed, which contains seeds they like.


Some of the younger calves, recently separated from their mothers, share a stall...


...and a feed bucket.


The barn is very peaceful, if a bit smelly and occasionally loud with moos.


Twice a day -- at their own pace, since they free-feed around the farm -- the milk cows head inside to be milked, then head back out to graze some more.