Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Poem for Monday and Marymoor Park

Year’s End 
By Richard Wilbur 

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show   
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   
And held in ice as dancers in a spell   
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   
Composedly have made their long sojourns,   
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze   
The random hands, the loose unready eyes   
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause   
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

-------- 

Monday was damp but not as rainy as Sunday -- lots of water in the air but not falling. I had laundry and various other chores to get done in the morning, which I did while watching the Music City Bowl, unfortunately won by Missouri over Iowa, but at least it was close for the Big 10 team; then after lunch we took a walk to Idylwood, where the beach is still closed but as a result there are many ducks hanging out at the lake shore. 

We watched most of Monday Night Football around dinner, rooting for the Lions since it won't affect any teams we care about more than them (it's too late for the 49ers anyway). We lit the sixth night Chanukah candles and now we're watching Alien: Romulus, which was pretty good (I demand a lot of sci-fi in my horror and a lot of brave women, which I got, though it's no Aliens). At Marymoor yesterday, storm remnants and heron nests:

2024-12-28 16.13.01

2024-12-28 16.31.31

2024-12-28 16.16.30

2024-12-28 16.27.24

2024-12-28 16.35.05

2024-12-28 16.27.07

2024-12-28 16.43.04

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