Today is the Persian Poet’s Birthday. Here is one of his poems:

A New Rule
It is the rule with drunkards to fall upon each other,
to quarrel, become violent, and make a scene.
The lover is even worse than a drunkard.
I will tell you what love is: to enter a mine of gold.
And what is that gold?

The lover is a king above all kings,
unafraid of death, not at all interested in a golden crown.
The dervish has a pearl concealed under his patched cloak.
Why should he go begging door to door?

Last night that moon came along,
drunk, dropping clothes in the street.
“Get up,” I told my heart, “Give the soul a glass of wine.
The moment has come to join the nightingale in the garden,
to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.”

I have fallen, with my heart shattered –
where else but on your path? And I
broke your bowl, drunk, my idol, so drunk,
don’t let me be harmed, take my hand.

A new rule, a new law has been born:
break all the glasses and fall toward the glassblower.

~~~~~

LOVE IS THE MASTER

Love is the One who masters all things;
I am mastered totally by Love.
By my passion of love for Love
I have ground sweet as sugar.
O furious Wind, I am only a straw before you;
How could I know where I will be blown next?
Whoever claims to have made a pact with Destiny
Reveals himself a liar and a fool;
What is any of us but a straw in a storm?
How could anyone make a pact with a hurricane?
God is working everywhere his massive Resurrection;
How can we pretend to act on our own?
In the hand of Love I am like a cat in a sack;
Sometimes Love hoists me into the air,
Sometimes Love flings me into the air,
Love swings me round and round His head;
I have no peace, in this world or any other.
The lovers of God have fallen in a furious river;
They have surrendered themselves to Love’s commands.
Like mill wheels they turn, day and night, day and night,
Constantly turning and turning, and crying out.

Get more info on his poetry here.

Cutout Heart
Originally uploaded by rehuxley.

My Country
Originally uploaded by rehuxley.

I found this flag postcard in a parking lot and immediately thought of the trauma this country has undergone with Katrina, 9/11, amd more. This is my homage to USA.

“My County tis of thee, sweet land of Liberty, of thee I sing!” Come and join in…

🙂

THE RED WHEELBARREL

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Today is the poet’s birthday:

Williams, William Carlos, 1883–1963, American poet and physician, b. Rutherford, N.J., educated in Geneva, Switzerland, Univ. of Pennsylvania (M.D., 1906), and Univ. of Leipzig, where he studied pediatrics. He is regarded as one of the most important and original American poets of the 20th cent. Williams began his medical practice in 1910 in Rutherford and was a physician for more than 40 years. His early poetry shows the influences of the various poetic trends of the time—from metaphorical imagism in Poems (1909) and The Tempers (1913) to free-verse expressionism in Al Que Quiere! (1917), Kora in Hell (1920), and Sour Grapes (1921). Williams observed American life closely, expressed anger at injustice, and recorded his impressions in a lucid, vital style. He developed a verse that is close to the idiom of speech, revealing a fidelity to ordinary things seen and heard. Later volumes of his poetry include Collected Poems (1934), Collected Later Poems (1950), Collected Earlier Poems (1951), Journey to Love (1955), Pictures from Brueghel, and Other Poems (1963; Pulitzer Prize), and a five-volume, impressionistic, philosophical poem, Paterson (1946–58), in which he uses the experience of life in an American city to voice his feelings on the duty of the poet. His essays include those in In the American Grain (1925), Selected Essays (1954), and Embodiment of Knowledge (1974). Among his other works are a collection of short stories, Make Light of It (1950); plays, including A Dream of Love (1948) and Many Loves (1950); and the novels A Voyage to Pagany (1928), a three-volume chronicle of an immigrant family in America, White Mule (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-Up (1952). His autobiography appeared in 1951 and his Selected Letters was published in 1957.

I was reading an article about the book Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat. I was surprised that it has had a little controversary in it’s past. I just loved how the monkey got into so much trouble from boing overly curious. I can relate…

Curious George

Curious George is a character and a popular book series starring a curious monkey named George, who is brought from his home in Africa by a man in a yellow hat to a big city. There, he lives with the man, called, simply enough, the man with the yellow hat.

Premise

The stories often consist of George getting into some form of trouble by being overly-curious, and the man with the yellow hat getting him out of it. George often learns a lesson from these adventures, which parallel the way young children learn about the world around them. Being children’s literature, these adventures only result in lessons that a young person can comprehend.

Source

Did you love Curious George as a child or adult? What was your favorite children’s book?

{coming together} chunky book
Originally uploaded by joleenieweenie.

This is a collaborative effort by variuos mixed media artists to support the Katrina relief efforts. Come take a look see and/or buy the book on ebay.

The flies buzzing was the first signal
The sunlight streaming through the bathroom window
Was the next…

I felt your presence like I always do
When I am awake enough to experience it –
How patient you are…

You come over me like gossamer,
Like a child’s giggle in the next room.
The beloved is waiting…

My heart sags in it’s basket
Sometimes worry causes me to forget
How you wait for me…

Spotlight: The Old Man and the Sea, one of Ernest Hemingway’s most famous works, was published on this date in 1952. Critics praised the novella, which was Hemingway’s last major work of fiction, and he won 1953’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Letters. In 1954, Hemingway was presented with the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

Quote: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” – Ernest Hemingway

Word: mellifluous: smooth and sweet; Hemingway once described William Faulkner as “Old Corndrinking Mellifluous.”

Source: http://Answers.com

From Answers.com:

American painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses, aka Grandma Moses, was born on this date in 1860. Having lived all her life in New York’s farm country, Grandma Moses took up painting when she was in her 70s, and too frail to do the manual work of the farm. She painted scenes of farm life in a style called naive or primitive. When she was 100, she illustrated Clement Moore’s A Visit from St. Nicholas. Grandma Moses died a year later.

Quote: “Paintin’s not important. The important thing is keepin’ busy.” – Anna Mary Robertson Moses

Word: sugaring off: the boiling of maple sap to make maple syrup; one of Grandma Moses’ most famous paintings was entitled, “Sugaring Off.”