Thursday, February 07, 2013

Poem for Thursday, National Aquarium, Les Mis

Lot's Wife
By Dana Littlepage Smith

Do not look behind you.
--Gen. 19:17

So simple a mistake. They say I turned to look;
instead it was to listen. I did not know: only the dead
can stand the music of the spheres made mortal.

Caught in my hood, the hard chords of chaos:
the childish scream, the mother's litany as she names
the loss which instantly unnames her.

And then the inconceivable: between the flint
blast and the crack of iron, I heard
the burning of the scorched moth wing,

the lily as its petals crisp to white fire,
but more than these, the footfall
of a naked man who runs to nothing.

And so I chose this brine,
now crystals shift. The salt dissolves
and I want to speak.

Whore of all hopes, I now believe
some stories survive
in order to remake their endings.

--------

Part of my day involved chores, and part of my day involved seeing Les Miserables again before the delay between the theatrical release and the DVD release. Guess which one I enjoyed more, though none of the chores made me cry, not even discovering that nothing in this world can get cat hair off a black velour shirt, while several Les Mis scenes still do. (If you are planning to leave a negative comment about Russell Crowe's singing or Tom Hooper's directing or something, please go do it somewhere else, like your own journal.)

In other news, the U.S. is losing Saturday mail delivery, to which boo, Monopoly is gaining a cat game piece, to which yay, and Vienna Teng has written a song that fits every single one of my fannish emotions now that I've heard the music from her new musical The Fourth Messenger. We watched basketball, then Nashville, in which the people act nearly as silly as they do on Dallas, yet between the actresses and the music, I don't even care (there should be a crossover, hee). Some National Aquarium animals from last weekend:
















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