A Blessing
A librarian is always surrounded by facts and fiction, whether on the shelves, online or in the world around her. It's her challenge and her joy to revel in the fantasies and stories that enrich our hearts and souls and to cut out the fallacies and dead ends to get to the truth. This blog is about a personal and professional search for both truth and fiction and how to tell the difference.
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Mary Oliver
Saturday, April 29, 2023
April is Poetry Month: Day 28
April is Poetry Month: Day 27
April
From: A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year, Edited by Jane McMorland Hunter, Batsford, 2020.
Friday, April 28, 2023
April is Poetry Month: Day 26
The Owl and the Pussycat
April is Poetry Month: Day 25
Today's poem is by one-time Poet Laureate, Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) He was 5 years old when Halley's Comet was visible from his birthplace, Worcester, MA. When he was nearly 90, the memory of that encounter. which had been simmering so long, finally emerged as a poem.
Halley's Comet
From: Fooling With Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft, Bill Moyers, William Morrow & Co, 1999.
April is Poetry Month: Day 24
Thursday, April 27, 2023
April is Poetry Month: Day 23
https://www.greatbigcanvas.com/view/bald-eagle-perched-on-spruce -branch-overlooking-the-chilkat-mountains-alaska,2116520/ |
The Eagle
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Wednesday, April 26, 2023
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It is really hard to be a consistent journalist, but I've already posted over 20 times this month and it feels good! I hope to continue to post regularly. Next month my focus will be on issues of information literacy...there is so much misinformation out there! It's like a jungle out there and I want to be your machete to chop your way through and untangle the overgrowth. Some of that misinformation is so compelling; we want to believe it.
I still believe that truth is the best way forward.
I'd appreciate your comments and support. What worries you? What bugs you? What confuses you?
There's nothing that I like more than an information challenge!
April is Poetry Month: Day 22
I still have enough poetry books on my shelves to make it to the end of the month choosing a book and sharing a poem from it, but I'd like to change it up a bit and share a poem I wrote about April.
Morning Run in April, Interrupted by a Sudden Sound. . .
Three geese,
photo image created on BeCasso from an original by J. Doolittle |
dipping tails into
a pond of pigment,
rise,
and with broad strokes
paint sky where there had been none.
More join the canvas
Adding clouds
and trees--
budding and expectant.
I forget to watch my feet.
Two robins,
Draw a solid stripe across my path
And settle on the grass,
Green, without a doubt,
Their shadows.
Jean Doolittle, 1995
I wrote this while I was in a poetry class and it benefited greatly from the critiques I received. It began overly verbose and sentimental, but we found that the heartwood was good and pruned it to discover the proper form and shape. I hope you can feel some of the magical transition that can happen only in spring; a transformation of the land, the life upon it, and ourselves, if we simply open ourselves to the experience.