Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Poem for Wednesday, Kenwood Flowers, Mockingjay

Continuity
By A.R. Ammons


I've pressed so
far away from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.

--------

I'm sure I've posted that poem before but Mockingjay made me think of it, and I spent pretty much the entire day reading it when I wasn't doing essential chores. I really loved it, except for the epilogue, but I felt about that the way I feel about far-off-future epilogues in general, which is that I don't like novelists who need to be control freaks and script in broad outlines everything that ever happened to their characters to stop readers from projecting their own futures. There's pretty much nothing I'd change about Katniss. I'm a bit sorry the whole series turned as dark as it did -- one of my favorite things about The Hunger Games was how positive it remained about humanity as a whole even though there were clearly some misguided, selfish, and just plain evil people -- but it felt more like the real world to me by the end, for whatever that's worth.

I did take Adam to tennis, where I got to hike in Cabin John Park (which had great blue herons fishing in the creek, and water still dripping off some of the trees after the big storms of the early morning, which included a tornado warning). We had breakfast food for dinner -- pancakes, scrambled eggs and peppers, snausages -- and spent the evening watching Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End to complete the trilogy. Daniel was busy packing for his robotics trip to North Carolina; he is annoyed because his new laptop will not arrive in time for the trip, but I'm inclined to think that's just as well, considering I'd rather him have time to make sure all the parts are there and all work before he bangs it around at a competition. Wednesday will be hectic picking up his school stuff, dropping off his travel stuff, then getting Adam to the orthodontist, so here are some Kenwood neighborhood cherry blossoms and I am off!















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