Interesting Words for The Day

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO
THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

Meditation from 14A


And what if the passage out of this life
is like a flight from Seattle to St. Louis—

the long taxi out of the body, the brief
and terrible acceleration, the improbable

buoyancy, and then the moment when,
godlike, you see the way things fit

together: the grave and earnest roads
with their little cars, stitching their desires

with invisible thread; the tiny pushpin houses
and backyard swimming pools, dreaming

the same blue dream. And who but the dead
may look down with impunity on these white

birds, strewn like dice above the river whose name
you have forgotten, though you know,

having crossed the Divide, that it flows
east now, toward the vast, still heartland,

its pinstriped remnants of wheat and corn
laid out like burial clothes. And how

you would like to close your eyes, if only
you could stop thinking about that small scratch

on the window, more of a pinprick, really,
and about yourself sucked out! anatomized!—

part of you now (the best part) a molecule
of pure oxygen, breathed in by the farmer

on his tractor; by the frightened rabbit
in the ditch; by a child riding a bike

in Topeka; by the sad wife of a Mexican
diplomat; by a dog, digging up a bone

a hundred years in the future, that foreign city
where you don't know a soul, but where you think

you could start over, could make a whole
new life for yourself, and will.


-Jennifer Maier

The Soldier
 
IF I should die, think only this of me;  
  That there's some corner of a foreign field  
That is for ever England. There shall be  
  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;  
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,          
  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,  
A body of England's breathing English air,  
  Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.  
  
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,  
  A pulse in the eternal mind, no less   
    Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;  
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;  
  And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,  
    In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke

As I get older, I die less.

-Willem Dafoe

Three Dog Night


In the old days, before houses were warm,
people did not sleep alone. Not even
windows went by themselves into

the cold sheets of night. Rooms were
lit with lanterns and children were
encouraged to jump on their beds,

warming themselves, before they
crawled inside. You might sleep with
your cousin or sister, your nose

buried in the summer of their
hair. You might place a baked potato
in your blanket to help it remember

warmth. A fire would be lit but, after
awhile, it would smolder down
to the bone silence of ash. Everything

was cold: the basin where you washed
your face, the wood floor, the windows
where you watched your breath

open over the framed blur of snow.
Your hands and feet were cold
and the trees were cold: naked,

traced in ice. You might take a dog
to bed or two or three, anything to lie
down with life, feel it breathing nearby.


- Faith Shearin, (from Moving the Piano)

Originally posted by Pianoman1
The Soldier
 
IF I should die, think only this of me;  
  That there's some corner of a foreign field  
That is for ever England. There shall be  
  In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;  
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,          
  Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,  
A body of England's breathing English air,   ...[text shortened]... friends; and gentleness,  
    In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Rupert Brooke

Originally posted by Pianoman1
My new years resolution is to learn a new word every day.
Today's discovery:

Uxorious - hen-pecked by your wife!

Snake


A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

D.H.Lawrence

I was trying to get back into this thread but since it's been a while I thought I'd ketchup on what was happening....well I found that in order to do so I'd have to spend too much time readding through the volumes of words so I'm outta here. I'm going back to reading my Encyclopedia Brittanica (circa 1978).

Originally posted by Great Big Stees

I was trying to get back into this thread but since it's been a while I thought I'd ketchup on what was happening....well I found that in order to do so I'd have to spend too much time readding through the volumes of words so I'm outta here. I'm going back to reading my Encyclopedia Brittanica (circa 1978).

Originally posted by Great Big Stees
I was trying to get back into this thread but since it's been a while I thought I'd ketchup on what was happening....well I found that in order to do so I'd have to spend too much time readding through the volumes of words so I'm outta here. I'm going back to reading my Encyclopedia Brittanica (circa 1978).

Originally posted by Great Big Stees
I was trying to get back into this thread but since it's been a while I thought I'd ketchup on what was happening....well I found that in order to do so I'd have to spend too much time readding through the volumes of words so I'm outta here. I'm going back to reading my Encyclopedia Brittanica (circa 1978).

Saturn 5 - Inspiral Carpets

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
[b]53

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
for even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do ...[text shortened]... such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile


-E. E. Cummings[/b]

"Baseballs Sad Lexicon"

These are the saddest of possible words:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double –
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

By Franklin Pierce Adams
New York Evening Mail July 10, 1910