TAKE OFF from February

Can we wait for February and it’s weather’s ups and downs to
be done with? I realize how weary we are for the change of
Spring and a sense of lift-off!

The armchair traveler in me will have to do with this poem:

TAKEOFF

Our jet storms down the runway, tilts up, lifts.
We’re airborne, and each second we see more —
Outlying hangars, wetland with a pond
That flashes like sheened silver and, beyond,
An estuary and the frozen drifts
Of breakers wide and white along a shore.

One watches, cheek in palm.  How little weight
the world has as it swiftly drops away!
How quietly the mind climbs to this height
As now, the seat-belt sign turned off, a flight
Attendant rises to negotiate
The steep aisle to a curtained service bay.”

……………………….TIMOTHY STEELE, from the book,
180  more Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, compiled
by Billy Collins.

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

Art by Lucy Campbell
Art by Lucy Campbell

ALWAYS & ALWAYS

What are the words we want to hear? How does
the sweet bird of hope call to us and lead us on?

I was quite surprised to encounter a word I had not
expected in a poem that was otherwise possibly an
ending. Who else, but the poet of my youth, would
leave such a light touch of promise!

LIsten:

” now all the fingers of this tree(darling) have
hands, and all the hands have people; and
more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand

and now you are and i am now and we’re
a mystery which will never happen again,
a miracle which has never happened before–
and shining this our now must come to then

our then shall be some darkness during which
fingers are without hands;and i have no
you:and all trees are(any more than each
leafless)its silent in forevering snow

–but never fear(my own,my beautiful
my blossoming)for also then’s until”

…………. e.e.Cummings
poem #99 in a Book of 100 Selected Poems.

I have put the book back on the shelf but I wonder,
now, what that hundreth poem could have been.

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

How does the sweet bird of hope call to us and lead us on?
ART by: LUCY CAMPBELL

DANCING ON THE CEILING

Shades of Astaire & Rogers, if you could have seen
me, dancing around my room with my chair wheels,
you would have known what wild delight it was for
me to move to music, the Big Bands of my youth’s
years of the Thirties and Forties.

I put my hands on the arms of my rolling chair quite
by accident, to move it out of the way so I could
make my bed. On my computer I had found the way
to have music in this room from Pandora One,
with help from my techie daughter Lizzie. Utter bliss.

Artie Shaw, with Begin the Beguine, took hold and
I took a turn, and then another, and I was dancing.
I walk with purpose and not easily. You’ve seen
my cane.

And yet, one accidental turn to music, and I was
dancing, my feet sure and safe, arms firmly
holding the “chair’s” arms, my heart light.
Who knew!

I thought you might find this worth knowing.
I went looking for a poem that might translate
this experience into a good ‘daily’ and found this:

“Tell all the Truth but tell it at a slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —”

………EMILY DICKINSON, from the book,
Good Poems, compiled by Garrison Keillor.

always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette

“I was dancing…my heart light.”
Painting by Lucy Campbell