“The Symbols of Labor. The Symbols of Work.”
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Gerard Van der Leun
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
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Thank you for sharing..
The anvil gravestone turns out to be a theme: Google “anvil gravestone” to see a few, most with a hammer on top. But it appears that the addition of the apron is unique to this one–
This post brought together two family traditions: my husband taught several generations of Scouts to do ironworking, and one of our sons now makes knives and jewelry, being both a blacksmith and a silvermith.
My mother, in her retirement, became interested in family history, which expanded into researching local cemeteries, and then developed into a hobby of graveyard jaunts: wherever she visited, we had to include a trip to photograph the nearest cemetery, and ponder the narratives hidden within the inscriptions and ornaments of the gravestones. (I now try to do the same, and often find them the most interesting part of my touring.)
She would have loved this one.
Reminds me of this tombstone …
https://gravelyspeaking.com/2011/04/16/lightning-strike/
https://www.tsop.org/TSOP2019/photos/Indiana%20Limeston%20Trail.pdf