Fern Hill

Anthony Hopkins chose to celebrate Earth Day by posting the poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas.

It brought back my memory of Andrew Mockler reading it aloud one teenage evening so many decades ago. Drea Maier was there too.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Happy Earth Day!

What started as an outpost of hippie yearning has become a new secular Easter. Earth Day, first celebrated on April 22, 1970, turns 54 years old today.

The top single on the Billboard 100 on that day was none other than "Let It Be" by the Beatles (or 'Ark the Angels Come as John Lennon quipped).

In the spirit of those times, I share with you these two love "birds" having a brief moment in Central Park, NYC last weekend.

1 Picture, 1000 Words. 2 Pictures, 2000 Words.

Here is my campaign ad. It conveys accurately and succinctly the choice in front of us American voters in 2024.

(I created it during Joe Biden's recent State of the Union speech.)

4 Bananas

Walking home from work

she held four yellow bananas 

up to her ear

like some kind of old-fashioned telephone.

Strange.

To Wait This Long To Read A Book

To wait this long to read a book is both sad and the luxury of living a longer life. In my case, The Catcher in the Rye I refer to, J.D. Salinger's 1951 novel that has sat on every American high schooler's reading list probably since the day it was published. It certainly sat there in the early 1980s, when I was in high school. Never read it. Until just now.

What a beautiful book. Well worth the wait, well worth the read. I can't help but feel that Holden Caulfield and Tom Sawyer are in essence the same character, the quintessential American cut-up, half mongrel rabbit, half avian shaman. That they are both white boys is hard to avoid in this day and age. I wonder if that archetype has disappeared in our multi-racial, multicultural world. In Holden's case too,  there's a post WWII American depression about it all. A boy who's lost. Gets himself kicked out of Pencey, his private boarding school in Pennsylvania. Because of this, he returns to New York City a few days early for his Christmas break and wants to hide out before he shows up at his parents' apartment to break them the bad news. 

He's a boy of 16 or 17, wandering the streets of New York by himself sometime in 1945 or '46, staying in cheap hotels, drinking his face off in bars as he desperately hits on women, thinking of his dead brother Allie often, smoking storms of cigarettes, procuring a whore via the hotel's elevator man which only ends up costing him too much and getting him beat up by the elevator man pimp, no sex. Then getting hit on by a gay teacher whom he confides in. And eventually sneaking back into his parents' apartment to find his baby sister Phoebe before he skips town. The two of them head to the Central Park Zoo where Phoebe convinces him not to go, through her wiles and guile. 

They find the carrousel instead. It was a favorite of hers. 

This is how he describes the end of that scene:

Boy, it began to rain like a bastard. In buckets, I swear to God. All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn't get soaked to the skin or anything, but I stuck around on the bench for quite a while. I got pretty soaking wet especially my neck and pants. My hunting hat really gave me quite a lot of protection, in a way, but I got soaked anyway. I didn't care, though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden, the way old Phoebe kept going around and around. I was damn near bawling, I don't know why. It was just that she looked so damn nice, the way she kept going around and around, in her blue coat and all. God, I wish you could've been there.

I was going to say I wish I could've been there too, but actually I felt as though I was there. In the rain, in Central Park, in 1946 or whenever.  

I also can't help but remember this 2011 article in The Paris Review by Blair Fuller regarding Salinger: 

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/02/07/an-evening-with-j-d-salinger/

Coming Through the Rye by Robert Burns

O, Jenny's a' weet, poor body, 
Jenny's seldom dry: 
She draigl't a' her petticoatie, 
Comin thro' the rye!

Chorus
Comin thro' the rye, poor body,
Comin thro' the rye,
She draigl't a' her petticoatie,
Comin thro' the rye!
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?

Chorus
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the glen
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warl' ken?

Chorus
Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the grain;
Gin a body kiss a body,
The thing's a body's ain.

IMHO

Seen in a recent text exchange about the best stance for an individual to take when confronting the pressing environmental imperatives staring us in the face ...

Well, neither hope nor cynicism will get us to a better place. Mostly it takes hard work, an open mind and a willingness and ability to try to understand how another person sees the world that allows actual change to happen. The system is designed to prevent any one group from overpowering another group by sheer strength alone. That said, the rich and powerful always start with a huge advantage in any discussion. Protest alone is unlikely to sway them IMHO.

To Kill A Mockingbird

 Right out of the pages of that novel, predating it by five years only ...

CNN — 

Carolyn Bryant Donham, the White woman whose accusation led to the 1955 lynching of Black teen Emmett Till in Mississippi – and whose role in the brutal death was reconsidered by a grand jury as recently as last year – has died in Louisiana, the Calcasieu Parish coroner’s office confirmed to CNN.

...

In August 1955, 14-year-old Emmett was beaten and shot to death after he allegedly whistled at Bryant – now Donham – in Money.

Later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and J.W. Milam, took Emmett from his bed and ordered him into the back of a pickup truck and beat him before shooting him in the head and tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River. They were both acquitted of murder by an all-White jury following a trial in which Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett grabbed and verbally threatened her. 

Milam, who died in 1980, and Bryant, who died in 1994, admitted to the killing in a 1956 interview with Look magazine.

In 2007, a Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Donham on any charges.

Donham testified in 1955 that Emmett grabbed her hand and waist and propositioned her, saying he had been with “White women before.” But years later, when professor Timothy Tyson raised that trial testimony in a 2008 interview with Donham, he claimed she told him, “That part’s not true.”

A Slightly Different Color

It's a noteworthy moment when a person finds themself writing something like this:

Thank you for these wise words. After a certain age, life takes on a slightly different color. The future is more limited, the past heavier. Certain joys in life decrease, and if they are not replaced by others, this leads to a feeling of sadness. At least it has in my case.