Poem for Saturday, For the Uniform, Neighborhood Fall Pics

An Exhortation
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chameleons feed on light and air:
   Poets' food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
   Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
   Would they ever change their hue
   As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
      Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,
   As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
   In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
   Where love is not, poets do:
   Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
      That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
   A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
   Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
   As their brother lizards are.
   Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
      Oh, refuse the boon!

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I've had a quiet Friday, not the happiest of days -- the mother of one of my neighbors passed away a couple of days ago, the grandmother of Adam's good friend Daniel Wigle, and though we initially planned to go to the viewing in the evening, Adam found out that Daniel was coming home to work on scanning photos for a memorial display and decided he wanted to stick around and help instead. Initially we had told my parents to come over for dinner because we thought we might also feed the Wigles' two younger boys, but it ended up being us and the friend at my parents' house for dinner.

I did have some work to get done, most of which was fun work; I posted my review of Deep Space Nine's "For the Uniform", in which Eddington rewrites Les Miserables to suit his own narrative about the Maquis (he's really more Enjolras than Valjean, but since he insists that Sisko be Javert, I enjoy Eddington's misreading anyway). Facebook was screwed up for much of the morning, which means I wasted less time there, and I half-watched Company in the evening. The weather was gorgeous yet again, so the high points of my day involved being in the woods in the neighborhood, where today we had not only deer and bunnies, but a barred owl and a little snake: