Poem for Thursday and Burren Brachiopods

Fanore Beach 

By Ciaran Burke 

Across the dunes dotted with gentian blue, to where the shades of grey sky lie fallen on the mirror of retreated tide. 

Beyond the washed-bronze sands scribed with black calligraphy the Atlantic waves drone. 

And a foot carves the sand, a journey to the soul, waiting to be washed away. 

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My Thursday was relatively uneventful -- chores in the morning, a walk to the beach in gorgeous weather in the afternoon. All the ducks have returned from wherever they spend the summer; we saw dozens of mallards, a few wood ducks, a couple of grebes, even a coot, plus the eagles were up and about. After dinner, I chatted with three of my usual Thursday night crowd. 

After that, we watched a movie I'm not allowed to mention...fine, it was the first Harry Potter movie, which is still magical and I'll erase all trace of She Who Must Not Be Named when everyone else gets rid of Willy Wonka, Pink Floyd, and all the other antisemites. Here are some of the fossils we saw at Fanore Beach in the Burren -- gastropods, brachiopods, crinoids, corals:

Poem for Wednesday and Fairy Bridges

Bundoran 

By E. Daly 

The Fairy Bridges where the sprits,

In moon-lit splendour sport and play,

Span chasms dark and lowering where

The lashing waters dash and spray.

And then the dear old Wishing Chair,

Where heart sick maids petitions lay,

Where thousands found each wish come true,

And ever bless the "happy day". 

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For the first time in several weeks, I had a typical social Wendesday -- chat with high school friends in the morning, though one had a work meeting and the other had computer issues so I mostly talked to Kay and her son. Then we had lunch and I watched an episode of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power with Kristen. I had half an eye on the day's baseball games -- happy about the Mets and Dodgers, not happy about the Guardians and KC -- but we did walk to the beach because it was a gorgeous day. 

Cheryl and I watched Agatha All Along together; it's been a darker show than I expected but I would watch most of those women in anything, and I appreciate the connections to Wanda Maximoff. Then we had dinner and watched The Masked Singer, which I'm ambivalent about because I love the Ship but I think the Buffaloes are Boyz II Men and they've been great. Here are some photos of County Donegal's Fairy Bridges and Wishing Chair, rock formations above one of Ireland's most famous surfing beaches: 

Poem for Tuesday and Knowth Passage Tomb

Knowth 

By James Caruth 

Five thousand years ago

they raised this mound

to house their dead,

dug two ditches around its edge,

etched on kerbstones, visible 

and invisible cycles of the moon.

Darkness weighs like a stone.

Somewhere a rat is scratching,

the sour air trembles at the throb

of a tiny heart, the quick insistence 

of claws seeking carrion, whetting teeth 

on bare bone. Night settles. 

The walls are closing in.

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Our dryer's broken temperature control has finally been fixed, so our trip laundries are finally finished! That was the big event here on Tuesday, apart from a trip to the dentist so Paul could get a crown glued back on that fell off in Ireland and I could do some shopping while he was in the chair. There were eagles flying over the Safeway, so I'm guessing there are salmon in the stream that runs behind it. 

My Voyager group watched "Shattered" which was as delightful as we had remembered it being; I'm going to pretend that was the series finale and the rest is bad fanfic. Afterward we saw the end of the Dodgers game over dinner, then this week's Only Murders in the Building (Melissa and Meryl!). Some pics from Knowth at Brú na Bóinne, which has at least 18 tombs and a vast amount of megalithic art: 

Greetings from Brú na Bóinne

We had absolutely perfect, partly cloudy, nearly 60-degree weather all day on Tuesday as we crossed both Irelands. After breakfast at the Beechlawn Hotel, we drove to the Giant's Ring in Ballynahatty, an enormous circular enclosure with a dolmen at the center. Then we went to two Brigid sites: St. Brigid's Shrine in Faughart, one of the places rumored to be her birthplace, which has the Stations of the Cross along a stream, and St. Brigid's Well at the Hill of Faughart, where Edward Bruce, High King of Ireland until 1318, was killed and buried in the cemetery nearby. We also visited Monasterboice, an ancient Christian church and graveyard, with a huge 10th century round tower and beautifully decorated high crosses. 

Then we went to a place long on my bucket list: Brú na Bóinne, the landscape containing passage tombs older than Stonehenge. We went first to the visitor center, where we ate lunch in the cafe there and saw exhibits on the building and, millennia later, excavation of the tombs, which are accessed via bus after crossing the Boyne. People aren't allowed to enter Knowth, dating at least 3000 BC, which has many decorated stones encircling it, but tour groups can walk on top of the mound, while Newgrange recreates the experience of the winter solstice sun inside the tomb, reaching the famous interior spiral. Our last stop was the Hill of Tara, inauguration site of Ireland's High Kings and another ancient burial mound. 

Greetings from BWI

I was expecting to have a pretty miserable Saturday -- I don't love flying even under the best of circumstances, when I'm traveling somewhere I've always wanted to go -- but an unexpectedly nice thing happened when we arrived at SeaTac for our flight east for Paul's mother's funeral: we discovered that we were on an Honor Flight with veterans from all the US armed forces being flown to see the memorials in DC. The oldest was a female World War II veteran in her late 90s, and there were veterans from the wars in Korea and Vietnam too, as well as family members and more recent military officers escorting them. 

This came with some perks for everyone on the plane, since Alaska provided cheese and fruit plates plus drinks (even alcohol) free to all of us, and we got to enjoy the plane decorations, the water cannon salute, and the applause when we disembarked. But it would have been wonderful just to witness the gathering before we boarded, the camaraderie among the soldiers and sailors, and the flight attendants -- some of whom were veterans as well -- dressed in retro uniforms and reading history chapters over the plane's PA system. We landed on time at BWI and now we're at a hotel in Hanover, watching the Maryland-Virginia game.

Poem for Tuesday and Conservatory Color

When I Was a Glacier
By Emily Skillings

That Bruegel painting
of hunters returning
in winter, the filmmakers
go nuts for it. A sad rabbit
on a stick & more. It’s like
really in there, tonally—
a male, disappointed
group trudge towards
a more lighthearted
communal flurry, women
and children full of fire
upholding weird roofs
doing the real work.

A moment ago I moved
something (not particularly
large) to the other side
of the table and felt
so old and immense
and in control. Like a truck
crunching on its path.
I project white onto the
floorboards. And isn’t
this music from that ballet
that always makes us?
Indistinguishable
from a folktale-pink shock

of pure quartz through the wall.
Give me one irregular mark
for my thigh to pit the year
against. 16th century sound
gets all over the daybed
and you relocate your teeth
to the opposite nipple.
My thought in that moment
it’s a brutal cave.
Brightest bird, tailfeather,
increasing gray line, fail me
my distant mountain.

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Running late watching the men's figure skating short program, which has contained some shocks and some astonishing performances, plus a couple of revelations from skaters I'd never heard of before this year's European championships. It was a pretty quiet day apart from the fact that we got new bird feeders (squirrels destroyed the metal hanger on one of the others, which will necessitate some creative repair) and I had to do some climbing in the front yard moving feeders and bird houses around. 

We took a walk before the rain started and ate un-sexy meals (vegan Spaghetti-Os for lunch, frozen fake chicken for dinner) after listening to my good friend's father give a talk about the Jews of Greece during the Holocaust on Zoom. We finally got ahold of our kids late at night -- older son spent last weekend judging a robotics competition whose final rounds were in Amazon's big conference hall, younger son was trying to finish a big project for work. Some pink color in Brookside's conservatory yesterday: 

Greetings from Quantico

We expected to be out of town for the Fourth of July so our plans were haphazard. We wanted to be home in the evening in case anyone was setting off fireworks locally because Katniss and Effie are terrified of the sound, so we decided to go to the National Museum of the Marine Corps near Quantico and we asked Cheryl if she wanted to meet us, since none of us had visited before. We had thought it would only take an hour or so to go through, but we greatly underestimated how extensive the museum is -- lots of interactive exhibits even with coronavirus shutdowns, many short films, dozens of vehicles and planes in displays and suspended from the ceiling, a walk-through troop carrier, a deeply air conditioned room designed to depict the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. We were there till the museum closed and didn't even have time to see the sculpture garden and chapel. 

 

Before going to the museum, we had eaten sandwiches in nearby Locust Shade Park nearby, and thought we might visit the Stafford Civil War Park afterward. But it was nearly dinnertime, so we drove instead to Stafford's Carlos O'Kelly's, the Tex-Mex-Irish restaurant we haven't visited in several years since the one in Fredericksburg closed (it was our standard place to eat after the Virginia Renfaire, but for obvious reasons that didn't happen last spring or this spring anyway). After enchiladas, we drove home and watched A Capitol Fourth, which our younger cats did not appreciate because even fireworks on TV bothers them, but they did not hide in a panic in the basement bathroom the way they do during thunderstorms. Then we watched some of The Bureau of Magical Things, which is pretty mindlessly distracting; if the show has a dark side, we haven't seen it yet, and it has lots of girl power.