Poem for Groundhog Day

Candlemas
By Denise Levertov

With certitude,
Simeon opened
ancient arms
to infant light.
Decades
before the cross, the tomb
and the new life,
he knew
new life.
What depth
of faith he drew on,
turning illumined
towards deep night.

--------

Happy Imbolc-Candlemas-Groundhog Day (and hope you are neither buried under snow nor getting flooded by a cyclone nor any other disaster, depending on where in the world you are). Writing a review of The Wrath of Khan is incredibly hard. I don't think I have anything to say about the movie that someone else hasn't already said somewhere else. I know I wrote about it when I first saw it, on the back of a school notebook or something, and I wish I had those scribbles, because I feel like I can neither give a fresh reaction to the film nor recreate what I felt the first time I saw it. I can't even remember if I already knew that Spock might not stay dead when I saw him die; I'm pretty sure I cried, but I don't know if I admitted that at the time (I was resisting the idea that I could be manipulated by movies or TV shows at the time, I almost never let myself cry over anything unless it was nuclear holocaust or something).

My day was not terribly eventful besides the above -- the kids had a two-hour delay before school started due to ice on the roads, meaning that the day felt two hours shorter to me, and Paul was home later in the morning, meaning that I was distracted, so by the time I finished folding the laundry while watching Monty Python, it was nearly time for Adam to get home. Apart from a walk and driving him to tennis, not much happened in the late afternoon, either. We watched the last episode (which I guess in the UK was the last two episodes) of Downton Abbey, which I have enjoyed enormously -- I wish the gay servant wasn't also the least sympathetic character on the show and I wish it weren't so hard to like Mary and Edith both, but I enjoy the upstairs-downstairs interplay and the sheer number of interesting women and the sets-costumes-estates.


Have a gratuitous hibiscus for Imbolc. I'll work on Great Falls photos tomorrow.