Blazing as they touch

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A u t u m n a l   A c c e n t s

Dogwood :: Side Yard

Columbia, South Carolina

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Underneath the leaves of life,

Green on the prodigious tree,

In a trance of grief

Stand the fallen man and wife:

Far away a single stag

Banished to a lonely crag

Gazes placid out to sea,

While from thickets round about

Breeding animals look in

On Duality,

And small birds fly in and out

Of the world of man.

Down in order from a ridge,

Bayonets glittering in the sun,

Soldiers who will judge

Wind towards a little bridge:

Even orators may speak

Truths of value to the weak,

Necessary acts are done

By the ill and the unjust;

But the Judgement and the Smile,

Though these two-in-one

See creation as they must,

None shall reconcile.

Bordering our middle earth

Kingdoms of the Short and Tall,

Rivals for our faith,

Stir up envy from our birth:

So the giant who storms the sky

In an angry wish to die

Wakes the hero in us all,

While the tiny with their power

To divide and hide and flee,

When our fortunes fall,

Tempt to a belief in our

Immortality.

Lovers running each to each

Feel such timid dreams catch fire

Blazing as they touch,

Learn what love alone can teach:

Happy on a tousled bed

Praise Blake's acumen who said:

'One thing only we require

Of each other; we must see

In another's lineaments

Gratified desire';

That is our humanity;

Nothing else contents.

Nowhere else could I have known

Than, beloved, in your eyes

What we have to learn,

That we love ourselves alone:

All our terrors burned away

We can learn at last to say:

'All our knowledge comes to this,

That existence is enough,

That in savage solitude

Or the play of love

Every living creature is

Woman, Man, and Child.'

= W.H. Auden =

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Happy Thursday

Leaves which shall murmur for years

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D e l i c a t e   B a l a n c e

Irmo Town Park

Irmo, South Carolina

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The mover of all things struggles

In the green-crowded, green-crowned nightmare

Of a great king packed in an acorn.

A train bends round a curve

Like a fish. An oak tree breaks

Out and shoves for the moonlight,

Bearing leaves which shall murmur for years,

Dumfoundedly, like mouths opened all at once

At just the wrong time to be heard.

Others, others.

= James Dickey =

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Happy Wednesday

I walked through the light air

 

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O v e r l a p

Elmwood Cemetery

Columbia, South Carolina

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Listen, love,

The fat lark sang in the field;

I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer,

The salt laughed and the stones;

The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,

And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,

The lovely diminutives.

I could watch! I could watch!

I saw the separateness of all things!

My heart lifted up with the great grasses;

The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.

There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of cedars,

And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.

The worms were delighted as wrens.

And I walked, I walked through the light air;

I moved with the morning.

= Theodore Roethke =

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Happy Tuesday

To match this beauty

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G l o r y   D a y s

Lake Murray

Columbia, South Carolina

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The glory of the beauty of the morning, --
The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;
The blackbird that has found it, and the dove
That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;
White clouds ranged even and fair as new-mown hay;
The heat, the stir, the sublime vacancy
Of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart: --
The glory invites me, yet it leaves me scorning
All I can ever do, all I can be,
Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue,
The happiness I fancy fit to dwell
In beauty’s presence. Shall I now this day
Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,
Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start
And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,
In hope to find whatever it is I seek,
Hearkening to short-lived happy-seeming things
That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?
Or must I be content with discontent
As larks and swallows are perhaps with wings?
And shall I ask at the day’s end once more
What beauty is, and what I can have meant
By happiness? And shall I let all go,
Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know
That I was happy oft and oft before,
Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,
How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,
Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.

= Edward Thomas =

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Happy Monday

Enchantment's Syndicate

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W e i g h t y   M a t t e r s

Elmwood Cemetery

Columbia, South Carolina

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The last of Summer is Delight --

Deterred by Retrospect.

'Tis Ecstasy's revealed Review --

Enchantment's Syndicate.

To meet it -- nameless as it is --

Without celestial Mail --

Audacious as without a Knock

To walk within the Veil.

= Emily Dickinson =

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Happy Saturday