| This year, today, the feast of St. Andrew and the first Sunday of Advent coincide.
Hail and blessed be the hour and moment
in which the Son of God was born
of the most pure Virgin Mary,
at midnight,
in Bethlehem,
in the piercing cold.
In that hour vouchsafe, I beseech Thee, O my God,
to hear my prayer and grant my desires,
[State your intention(s) here...]
through the merits of Our Saviour Jesus Christ
and of His blessed Mother. Amen.
This prayer is to be recited fifteen times a day, starting on St. Andrew's day, ending on Christmas eve. This will be my third year praying it. As the author of a blog I've recently discovered points out, "They are very beautiful words, you really want to say them over and over again."
Her post: http://starrymantle.blogspot.com/2008/11/christmas-anticipation-prayer.html | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| I thought about the baby that everybody wanted dead and saw it very clearly. It was in a dark, wet place, its head covered with great O's of wool, the black face holding, like nickels, two clean black eyes, the flared nose, the kissing-thick lips, and the living, breathing silk of black skin. No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live -- just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals. And Frieda must have felt the same thing. We did not think about the fact that Pecola was not married; lots of girls had babies who were not married. And we did not dwell on the fact that the baby's father was Pecola's father too; the process of having a baby by any male was incomprehensible to us -- at least, she knew her father. We thought only of this overwhelming hatred for the unborn baby.
from The Bluest Eye | | comments: Leave a comment |
| This was a Milosz poem that moved me during our trip. Had I read it before? Probably - but probably not.
INCANTATION
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I have always thought that one of our goals as parents is to fill our children's
memory bank with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pleasant scenes.
Dr. Sears
"It's a blind," her father said.
"What's a blind?" Alessandro asked.
"Memory of things like days at the sea, or thunderstorms."
"I love those things," Alessandro said. "You can't imagine
how much I love them."
"Alessandro, in memory, things, objects, and sensations
merely stand in for the people you love." He had to rest and
breathe before he continued. After awhile, he said, "If I long
for a thunderstorm in Rome sixty years ago, or seventy, for
the heavy rain and the disheveled lightning, for the wet trees
that were completely free and abandoned, it's not
because of the rain, or the quiet, or the ticking of the clock in
in the hall way - all of which I remember - but because of my
mother and my father, who held me at the window as we
watched the storm."
Mark Helprin, Soldier of the Great War | | comments: Leave a comment |
| When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder,
Down where the sweating gang its labour plies,
A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder
Unslings her child tormented by the flies.
She takes him to a ring of shadow pooled
By thorn-trees: purpled with the blood of ticks,
While her sharp nails, in slow caresses ruled,
Prowl through his hair with sharp electric clicks,
His sleepy mouth plugged by the heavy nipple,
Tugs like a puppy, grunting as he feeds:
Through his frail nerves her own deep languors ripple
Like a broad river sighing through its reeds.
Yet in that drowsy stream his flesh imbibes
An old unquenched unsmotherable heat —
The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,
The sullen dignity of their defeat.
Her body looms above him like a hill
Within whose shade a village lies at rest,
Or the first cloud so terrible and still
That bears the coming harvest in its breast. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death
I lay there sleeping and my magic head
remembered and forgot. On first cry I
remembered and forgot and did believe.
I knew love and I knew evil:
woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind,
despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who
knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass,
and the black snake with gold bones.
Black sleeps, gold burns; on second cry I woke
fully and gave to feed and fed on feeding.
Gold seed, green pain, my wizards in the earth
walked through the house, black in the morning dark.
Shadows grew in my veins, my bright belief,
my head of dreams deeper than night and sleep.
Voices of all birth arise, simple as we,
found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream,
deep as this hour, ready again to sleep. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| these beauties
516
Beauty - be not caused - It Is -
Chase it, and it ceases -
Chase it not, and it abides -
Overtake the Creases
In the Meadow - when the Wind
Runs his fingers thro' it -
Deity will see to it
That You never do it -
543
I fear a Man of frugal Speech -
I fear a Silent Man -
Haranguer - I can overtake -
Or Babbler - entertain -
But He who weigheth - While the Rest -
Expend their furthest pound -
Of this Man - I am wary -
I fear that He is Grand -
1383
Long Years apart - can make no
Breach a second cannot fill -
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell -
The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand - | | comments: Leave a comment |
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