Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Poem for Tuesday and Canal Wildlife

The Sun Rising
By John Donne

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me
Whether both the'Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear: "All here in one bed lay."

She is all states, and all princes I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compar'd to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy'as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

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Somehow I have acquired a summer cold, even though none of my kids or their friends are sick and I can't figure out who I've been around who's been sneezing. Sigh. So I did not have a very eventful Monday, though the weather was magnificent -- it stayed in the low 80s -- and the neighborhood bunnies were all out munching grass with their noses twitching in the afternoon.

Adam went running for the first time since he had his wisdom teeth removed and felt out of shape, then he biked to a friend's house and went to his summer art class in the evening. Daniel reached some level in some video game that he was excited about and watched some more Relic Hunter with us after dinner. Here are some photos from along the C&O Canal:















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