About 30% of people diagnosed with breast cancer at any stage will develop distal metastasis. I am one.
It’s a poetry reading kind of day and I turned, as I so often do, to Emily Dickinson. Thumbing through a couple of collections, here is where I stopped (poem 749): All but Death, can be Adjusted— Dynasties repaired— Systems—settled in their Sockets— Citadels—dissolved— Wastes of Lives—resown with Colors...
Changing the tone a little bit today, I’d like to share Poem XXVI from A.E. Housman’s The Shropshire Lad. The gentle rhythm and straightforward rhymes belie the complexity of the underlying emotions. I’d love to hear your reactions. The half-moon westers low, my love, And the wind brings up the rain;...
A sonnet today. Shakespeare. Love, he says, is constant: unchanging even in the face of change, unfaltering even in a raging storm. It is a fixed point of reference even when it it is undervalued. Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love...
… Abyss by Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) Translation by Jerzy Peterkiewicz Abyssus abyssum invocat (*) You always see it as space filled with cascades of air where glass splinters reflect and glitter like seeds planted in distant stones. Now observe the abyss that glitters in the eye’s...
A smarty and funny Twitter friend and blogger recently reminded me of William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus. Think of it as a Victorian teenage boy’s version of Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. At the dawn of his adolescence, Henley was stricken by osseous tuberculosis, eventually having to endure a below-the-knee...
(Poem 917 – published 1896) Love – is anterior to Life – Posterior – to Death – Initial of Creation, and The Exponent of Earth – —– (Poem 974 – published 1925 but written the same year as 917, 1894) The Soul’s distinct connection With immortality Is best disclosed by...
Another Hopkins poem, a lament written in saddened outrage at the felling of these trees, but which I love for the pleasure of the rhyme and rhythm and for the startling, shocking imagery in the second part. Binsey Poplars, felled in 1879 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled...
I’ve always been attracted to life on the margins. People and places and things that are out of the mainstream always seem more colorful to me, more interesting. Now, in the full glory of middle life, I have chosen a lifestyle that puts me on the margins of society. Some...
Since I am come to that holy room, Where, with thy choir of saints for evermore, I shall be made thy music, as I come I tune the instrument here at the door, And what I must do then, think now before. ….. This is the first...
I’ve been dipping into Emily Dickinson while ill in bed the last few days. My parents gave me a little book of a few of her poems when I was about 10 or 11 years old, and I’ve been reading her ever since. No matter what I am feeling, she...