Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Van der Leun: The Normblog Bio of Your Host
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
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
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
Comments on this entry are closed.
That FJB appears masked, unmasked, then masked again is similar to the color codes of imminent danger W used to invent on a daily basis. The risks of our survivability would go from yellow to orange to red and back down to orange as often as the wind changed direction. The secret mysterious wisdom of our Presidents must be obeyed or else we all shall die. FJB wearing a mask on Wednesday after his triumphant unmasked Stare of the Union address means death is encroaching closer now. Only masks and FJB can save us.
Local library is offering the taxpayers a crumb or two. As of Monday, adult patrons are strongly encouraged to continue wearing face thongs, but same are no longer mandatory. Children, however, remain required to do so. Leftists seem hell-bent to do as much damage to kids as they possibly can.
https://tinyurl.com/2p98vr4f
As for LGB and his vacuous on again/off again face-diapering: only the terrorized, most compliant, unquestioning care anymore.
“Got to keep the loonies on the path.”
https://tinyurl.com/2p93t22s
Ragmouth Joe
JWM
Good one, JWM!
Gets funnier with repetition.
It’s all politics. You can’t demand absentee voting and uncontrolled drop boxes without the scare tactics of masks and social distancing. They stole the 2020 election and they desperately need to steal the 2022 election. If Republicans were to solidly win both houses it is possible that they would investigate many of the scandals and the Democrats behind them. For many big Democrats losing power right now could mean exposure of their crimes and even indictments.
“If Republicans were to solidly win both houses it is possible that they would investigate many of the scandals and the Democrats behind them. For many big Democrats losing power right now could mean exposure of their crimes and even indictments.”
It is not just Dems that will be investigated. Plenty of RINOs will be as well. At the local level big things are happening. People are pissed and they are not settling for “we won’t vote our way out of this” talk.
It starts local with demanding and being there in the polling places and the counting rooms to ensure that the ’22 election is not stolen. AZ and WI are in the process of de-certifying the 2020 election. Big things happening in GA as well. We are still fighting here in PA to rescind ACT 77 which was the lynchpin to stealing the election here.
There are Dems that see the writing on the wall and are cashing in their chips now, before the trials and prosecutions begin.
Overwhelming them with the vote is only part of the equation. Speaking truth is another. showing up is another. Don’t surrender your position, your vote or your principals because you have lost hope.
Keep fighting!
90% or more of politicians are on the criminal take and none will sell out the others, and even if they did the wheels of justice would drag for decades with no justice actually done at all. From here on out the only justice will be instant and sure and from the barrel of a gun. Politics got us where we are and more politics will get more of the same. Most people, it seems, can’t break out of that dubble bubble.
Weekly Report on Biden Movements:
Monday: Nothing
Tuesday: Nothing
Wednesday: Small amount, some blood.
Thursday: Nothing…….
Look closely, that theirs what a “ Meat Puppet”. Looks like.