Frank in Colorado

From The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry: bookshop.org/a/862/9781582430379

#poem #books #writing

Overheads When I was young the constellations were glints of bone, suspended skeletons, whose mythic forms loomed large as legends; the pinned sagas of my junior skies. Then a telescope brought the stars to me. Freed from their confinement by the sound of science, I understood something of the universe’s atomic roar. I noticed colours: odd drops of blood, the discarded flecks from a manhandled bullion and tints from the deftest breath of blue. For a time, these sparks scarred me as the furthest outriders from the pomp of a Creator’s blaze. Now my exploded theology has flung these thoughts aside and all my myths have died. With only science left, half a knowledge no longer enough to hear the birth of light; and the sky is mute again, the darkness, undisguised.

Hullo #vss365 and to #blood
Another old one today.

Only in our doing can we grasp you. Only with our hands can we illumine you. The mind is but a visitor: it thinks us out of our world. Each mind fabricates itself. We sense its limits, for we have made them. And just when we would flee them, you come and make of yourself an offering. I don't want to think a place for you. Speak to me from everywhere. Your Gospel can be comprehended without looking for its source. When I go toward you it is with my whole life. — Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Book 1, 51

Rilke—forever sublime.

SPLEEN The roses they were all so red, and the ivy was all black. Dear, if you merely turn your head, all my old despair comes back. The sky was much too blue and clear, the sea too green, the air too bright. I must expect, and always fear, you’ll make some wild atrocious flight. I’m tired of the varnished holly-tree and of the shining boxwood too, tired of the field’s monotony and of everything, alas, but you!

everything, alas,

Paul Verlaine, tr. C. F. MacIntyre

This is the heart of Eckhart.

From 📚 'Meister Eckhart's Book of the Heart'

Throughout most of January, they had to do construction in our basement. In order to maintain a clear path to the front door, we were basically unable to use our living room. After nearly three weeks, that finished. Then our furnace broke. So they got that fixed. Then Pittsburgh got hit by the heaviest snowstorm we've had in about 15 years. Then because of all the snow and our frozen gutters, our bathroom and kitchen started leaking. All of this has been on top of dealing with loud neighbors, working nearly 60 hour weeks between two jobs, a year long mouse infestation, and the ultimate kicker, the news that I will be booted out of my place in a few months, and I have a lot of other things to do before I can focus on my own relocation. Hopefully, this paints a somewhat clearer picture as to why things with the channel have been placed on the back burner. It's not because I haven't wanted to work on stuff, but because actual free time has become a rare thing, and free time where I have the energy and creative drive to work on things is even rarer. I am truly, deeply sorry and hope you can all understand.

A brief summary of why the channel has been so inactive lately and a brief update on my life. You all deserve to know what's going on:

Words for these times..
“The truth will out, to your disgrace”
From ‘Butcher”s Dozen’
By Thomas Kinsella
Written in response to the British establishment’s “cold putting aside of truth” with Widgery’s attempt to whitewash the murder of 13 innocent Irish people on Bloody Sunday, Jan 30 1972

For Alex Jeffrey Pretti Murdered by I.C.E January 24, 2026 by Amanda Gorman We wake with no words, just woe & wound. Our own country shoot ing us in the back is not just brutal ity; it's jarring betrayal; not enforcement, but execution. A message: Love your people e you will die. Yet our greatest threat isn't the outsiders among us, but those among us who never look within. Fear not the those without papers, but those without conscience. Know that to care intensively, united, is to carry both pain-dark horror for today & a profound, daring hope for tomorrow. We can feel we have nothing to give, & still belove this world wait ing, trembling to change. If we cannot find words, may we find the will; if we ever lose hope, may we never lose our humanity. The only undying thing is mercy, the courage to open ourselves like doors, hug our neighbor, & save one more bright, impossible life.

The heartbreakingly beauty of Amanda Gorman’s words for humanity. Be the light. Save a soul.

The poem “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

I’m thinking of Maggie Smith’s poem ‘Good Bones’ bc I’m hosting my daughter’s birthday party while thinking about today’s murder by ICE, & bc, while I engage my kids to protest injustice, I can’t tell them HOW much I have in common w/ the last 2 people ICE has shot & killed bc they worry about me.

The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young

By William Blake

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

...

#poetry #Blake

Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.

I like to joke about Arnold, but this stanza slaps

Be ahead of all partings, as if they were behind you, like the winter that’s just past. For among the winters is one so endlessly winter that your heart, if you overwinter, can survive it. Be dead in Eurydice, always—, climb with more song, climb with more praise, back up into pure relation. Here in the kingdom of decay, among what’s wasting, be a tingling glass that shatters itself with sound. Exist while you know the state of nonexistence, the endless ground of your own deep pulse, so that you can fulfill it completely this one time. With the used-up, as well as the muffled and useless stock of full nature, the unreckoned sum, count yourself in, rejoicing, and then demolish the count.

the endless ground of your own deep pulse,

Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. David Young

Worthwhile poem? ✅️

Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas. Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave 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, be now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This poem has held so very much meaning to me over the last several years. Trivia: my brother was named for Dylan Thomas. I was named for Thomas' college roommate, John Ramsay. My father met Thomas during his BBC years, and was friends with Ramsay until John's death.

“Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up.
And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.”

travelling backwards because someone has died flying into dawn lifting off year after year through fog & sunhatch no one is left who says See how beautiful it all is darling on the plane waiting you see daybreak a scar how the torn sky whitens and how the Matterhorn shaped after all like an alp is nobody’s mother

flying into dawn

Kinereth Gensler

The Consolation of Dying It is not a wish, not a yearning for endings, but a quiet recognition that everything-every bruise of the day, every unfinished sentence, every grief that keeps pulling up a chair will someday loosen its grip. There is a tenderness in that knowing, a gentle exhale at the far edge of exhaustion, the way a storm finally breaks and the air smells like renewal even before the sun returns. The consolation is not in disappearing, but in the promise that nothing stays as sharp as it feels now that even pain is mortal, that even sorrow has an end. And in that inevitability, there is a strange kind of mercy the reminder that we are finite, that we do not have to hold everything forever, that release-natural, eventual, quiet as a tide going out is part of being human.

The #Consolation of Dying

It is not a wish,
not a yearning for endings,
but a quiet recognition
that everything-every bruise of the day,
every unfinished sentence,
every grief that keeps pulling up a chair
will someday loosen its grip.
#vss365 #poetry #dying

When a poem becomes a prayer.

Siegfried Sassoon (1934)

Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines

The Evolution of Father Christmas - Starkey Comics Who is Father Christmas? Where did he come from? Is he another word for Santa, an ancient English tradition, or a Norse god in disguise?

starkeycomics.com/2018/12/17/t...

Comic. Panels up to the 10-year point are grayed out. New panels since the Ten Years comic, which chronicles the first ten years of PERSON 1's journey with cancer: (1) [two people in bed] PERSON 1 (woman): One more chapter? PERSON 2 (man): Don’t we both have to get up early? PERSON 1: Nnnnnggggh PERSON 2: Sure, good point. (2) [many people wearing masks, walking while looking at graphs on their phones] (3) [birds landing on people] PERSON 2 in beanie and scarf: Hah! They like *my* seeds best. PERSON 1 in scarf holding phone with a bird sitting on it: Wait, how do I take a picture of this one? (4) [two people rowing boats with tree landscape] (5) [Person 1 carries overflowing stack of things to Person 2 in bed] PERSON 1: I brought you honey lemon tea, more pillows, a cinnamon roll, Tylenol, another blanket, a– PERSON 2: It was just Appendicitis, I’m really– PERSON 1: *It is my turn to take care of you and I am going to do it right!* (6) [Two people in car] (7) [still in car) PERSON 1: Oh my god. PERSON 2: Oh my god. (8) [car driving] PERSON 1: Pull over! PERSON 2: I am! (9) [both people get out of car] (10) [Large colored panel of aurora borealis over water with both people looking on] (11) [Person 1 sits against tree while Person 2 lies on the ground] PERSON 1: Fifteen years. No sign of the cancer. (12) I *am* having some weird symptoms. Joint pain. Fatigue. I think I’m losing my close-up vision. PERSON 2: Yeah. Me too. (13) PERSON 2: I think we’re getting old. (14) PERSON 1: I guess that’s okay. PERSON 2: It’s all I wanted.

Fifteen Years

xkcd.com/3172/

I think one clear outcome of the shutdown is incontrovertible proof that Chuck Schumer is not a wartime consigliere.

If you believe the Grindr rumors, daily lies on behalf of the regime are basically an amuse bouche.

"Water No Get Enemy"
Song by Africa 70 and Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti

Negotiations Expert Explains Why Trump Fails To Get Deals Done One of the nation’s leading experts on the subject of negotiations is David Honig of Indiana University. He teaches both Fortune 500 company executives and heads of state on how to negotiate. Here’s h...

www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...