Poem for Tuesday and Pigs at the Fair

After The Fair
By Thomas Hardy

The singers are gone from the Cornmarket-place
With their broadsheets of rhymes,
The street rings no longer in treble and bass
With their skits on the times,
And the Cross, lately thronged, is a dim naked space
That but echoes the stammering chimes.

From Clock-corner steps, as each quarter ding-dongs,
Away the folk roam
By the "Hart" and Grey's Bridge into byways and "drongs,"
Or across the ridged loam;
The younger ones shrilling the lately heard songs,
The old saying, "Would we were home."

The shy-seeming maiden so mute in the fair
Now rattles and talks,
And that one who looked the most swaggering there
Grows sad as she walks,
And she who seemed eaten by cankering care
In statuesque sturdiness stalks.

And midnight clears High Street of all but the ghosts
Of its buried burghees,
From the latest far back to those old Roman hosts
Whose remains one yet sees,
Who loved, laughed, and fought, hailed their friends, drank their toasts
At their meeting-times here, just as these!

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Monday was astonishingly cool for August in DC, overcast and occasionally damp but no storms. I spent the whole day doing chores, some of which were kind of fun -- we're consolidating our DVDs and Blu-rays into binders, so I was taking them out of their cases, deciding which inserts to save, and organizing them, which I thought might trigger my I-hate-breaking-up-sets compulsion but only made me realize what a ridiculous amount of paper and plastic used to be wasted in these packages; it was fun taking apart ten seasons of Smallville DVDs and watching them get more compact. 

It was a gorgeous day for a walk, then we had Impossible Burgers for dinner. After that, we watched two episodes of The Orville -- "Twice in a Lifetime" which I enjoyed as long as I didn't try to figure out things like "How did he get a birth certificate for security clearance?" and we got to hear Scott Grimes sing, and "From Unknown Graves" which had two storylines that again felt in dialogue with Star Trek episodes, the planet of the strong women with subservient men where Riker was banging one of the leaders and Data and Lore's struggles with emotion chips. Piggies at the county fair: