Dew On Leaves Quotes

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

Amor" So many days, oh so many days seeing you so tangible and so close, how do I pay, with what do I pay? The bloodthirsty spring has awakened in the woods. The foxes start from their earths, the serpents drink the dew, and I go with you in the leaves between the pines and the silence, asking myself how and when I will have to pay for my luck. Of everything I have seen, it's you I want to go on seeing: of everything I've touched, it's your flesh I want to go on touching. I love your orange laughter. I am moved by the sight of you sleeping. What am I to do, love, loved one? I don't know how others love or how people loved in the past. I live, watching you, loving you. Being in love is my nature. You please me more each afternoon. Where is she? I keep on asking if your eyes disappear. How long she's taking! I think, and I'm hurt. I feel poor, foolish and sad, and you arrive and you are lightning glancing off the peach trees. That's why I love you and yet not why. There are so many reasons, and yet so few, for love has to be so, involving and general, particular and terrifying, joyful and grieving, flowering like the stars, and measureless as a kiss. That's why I love you and yet not why. There are so many reasons, and yet so few, for love has to be so, involving and general, particular and terrifying, joyful and grieving, flowering like the stars, and measureless as a kiss.

They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages. But she loved him so much, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews.

But just let me tell you something, son, a woman's love is like the morning dew, it's just as apt to settle on a horse turd as it is on a rose. So you better just get over it.

There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass, Or night-dews on still waters between walls Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes; Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. Here are cool mosses deep, And thro' the moss the ivies creep, And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep, And from the craggy ledge the poppy hangs in sleep.

The skies bend, the time stops, the lanes move and the fires dance, It can mean only one thing that I am with you. You are enigmatic yet so beautiful that I have lost my sense, You are as immaculate as the unadulterated morning dew And your beauty leaves me in a mystified trance. I do not foresee what you and I will be But I promise to be with you till the rocks keep meeting the sea.

The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as with think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it us utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that event the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity---so much lower than that of daylight---makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.

As dew leaves the cobweb lightly Threaded with stars, Scattering jewels on the fence And the pasture bars; As dawn leaves the dry grass bright And the tangled weeds Bearing a rainbow gem On each of their seeds; So has your love, my lover, Fresh as the dawn, Made me a shining road To travel on, Set every common sight Of tree or stone Delicately alight For me alone.

Love, he has abandoned me, do with me as you will. Love, he left - unceremoniously, why must I love him still? The best of me I gave to him - the years, the days, the hours. Precious little, in turn he'd given, like dew to a wilting flower. Love, he sheared away tenderly, my beauty, my strength, my mind, the gifts that were bestowed to me - were swallowed in his pride. Love, has he forgotten me? Please tell me what you've heard, I guard his memory jealously - with him I'd place my worth.

Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.

The autumn winds rushing Waft the leaves that are searest, But our flower was in flushing, When blighting was nearest. Fleet foot on the correi, Sage counsel in cumber, Red hand in the foray, How sound is thy slumber! Like the dew on the mountain, Like the foam on the river, Like the bubble on the fountain, Thou art gone, and for ever!

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

The eastern sky was red as coals in a forge, lighting up the flats along the river. Dew had wet the million needles of the chaparral, and when the rim of the sun edged over the horizon the chaparral seemed to be spotted with diamonds. A bush in the backyard was filled with little rainbows as the sun touched the dew. It was tribute enough to sunup that it could make even chaparral bushes look beautiful, Augustus thought, and he watched the process happily, knowing it would only last a few minutes. The sun spread reddish-gold light through the shining bushes, among which a few goats wandered, bleating. Even when the sun rose above the low bluffs to the south, a layer of light lingered for a bit at the level of the chaparral, as if independent of its source. The the sun lifted clear, like an immense coin. The dew quickly died, and the light that filled the bushes like red dirt dispersed, leaving clear, slightly bluish air. It was good reading light by then, so Augustus applied himself for a few minutes to the Prophets. He was not overly religious, but he did consider himself a fair prophet and liked to study the styles of his predecessors. They were mostly too long-winded, in his view, and he made no effort to read them verse for verse—he just had a look here and there, while the biscuits were browning.

And when I look around the apartment where I now am,—when I see Charlotte’s apparel lying before me, and Albert’s writings, and all those articles of furniture which are so familiar to me, even to the very inkstand which I am using,—when I think what I am to this family—everything. My friends esteem me; I often contribute to their happiness, and my heart seems as if it could not beat without them; and yet—if I were to die, if I were to be summoned from the midst of this circle, would they feel—or how long would they feel—the void which my loss would make in their existence? How long! Yes, such is the frailty of man, that even there, where he has the greatest consciousness of his own being, where he makes the strongest and most forcible impression, even in the memory, in the heart of his beloved, there also he must perish,—vanish,—and that quickly. I could tear open my bosom with vexation to think how little we are capable of influencing the feelings of each other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight which I do not naturally possess; and though my heart may glow with the most lively affection, I cannot make the happiness of one in whom the same warmth is not inherent. Sometimes I don’t understand how another can love her, is allowed to love her, since I love her so completely myself, so intensely, so fully, grasp nothing, know nothing, have nothing but her! I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all. I possess so much, but without her I have nothing. One hundred times have I been on the point of embracing her. Heavens! what a torment it is to see so much loveliness passing and repassing before us, and yet not dare to lay hold of it! And laying hold is the most natural of human instincts. Do not children touch everything they see? And I! Witness, Heaven, how often I lie down in my bed with a wish, and even a hope, that I may never awaken again! And in the morning, when I open my eyes, I behold the sun once more, and am wretched. If I were whimsical, I might blame the weather, or an acquaintance, or some personal disappointment, for my discontented mind; and then this insupportable load of trouble would not rest entirely upon myself. But, alas! I feel it too sadly; I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my own bosom contains the source of all my pleasure. Am I not the same being who once enjoyed an excess of happiness, who at every step saw paradise open before him, and whose heart was ever expanded towards the whole world? And this heart is now dead; no sentiment can revive it. My eyes are dry; and my senses, no more refreshed by the influence of soft tears, wither and consume my brain. I suffer much, for I have lost the only charm of life: that active, sacred power which created worlds around me,—it is no more. When I look from my window at the distant hills, and behold the morning sun breaking through the mists, and illuminating the country around, which is still wrapped in silence, whilst the soft stream winds gently through the willows, which have shed their leaves; when glorious Nature displays all her beauties before me, and her wondrous prospects are ineffectual to extract one tear of joy from my withered heart,—I feel that in such a moment I stand like a reprobate before heaven, hardened, insensible, and unmoved. Oftentimes do I then bend my knee to the earth, and implore God for the blessing of tears, as the desponding labourer in some scorching climate prays for the dews of heaven to moisten his parched corn.

You must find a place on a woman's body and live there. In the dark, the noise far away, Sam ran his hands over Calliope's body and the world of work and worry seemed to move away. He found two depressions at the bottom of her back where sunlight collected, and he lived there, out of the wind and noise. He grew old there, died and ascended to the Great Spirit, found heaven in her cheek on his chest, the warm wind of her breath across his stomach carried sweet grass and sage, and... In another lifetime he had lived on the soft skin under her right breast, his lips riding light over the ridge and valley of every rib, shuffling through downy, dew damp hairs like a child dancing through autumn leaves. In the mountain of her breast, he fasted at the medicine wheel of her aureole, received a vision that he and she were steam people, mingled wet with no skin seperating them. And there he lived, happy. She followed, traveled, lived with him and in him as he was in her. They lived lifetimes and slept and dreamed together. It was swell.

When we were alive, they told us that when we died we'd go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That's what they said. And that's what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn't a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace. But now this child has come offering us a way out and I'm going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

The next morning dawned cool and clear. The early mist had lifted, leaving a thick layer of dew clinging to the hillsides beyond the castle, shimmering in the morning sun like faerie dust sprinkled over a lush bed of emerald. Like his eyes.

These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself. In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.

Erupting like fiery autumn leaves between silks as skin meets skin flames that lick everything and consume all there is.

On No Work of Words On no work of words now for three lean months in the bloody Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft: To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven, The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft. To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing death That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark. To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice. Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.

Birdwatching, at first glance, seems like a pursuit designed specifically for people who find stamp collecting too stimulating. But oh, how wrong they would be. Behind the courteous nods, the gentle lift of binoculars and the soft pitter-patter of birder footsteps on dew-dappled gum leaves lies a world of unexpected drama – a scandalous underbelly of rivalry, controversy and intrigue. Indeed, what appears to be a peaceful communion with nature masks a tempest of Shakespearean passion.

WHEN the voices of children are heard on the green, And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast, And everything else is still. Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down, And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies. No, no, let us play, for it is yet day, And we cannot go to sleep; Besides, in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all cover’d with sheep. Well, well, go and play till the light fades away, And then go home to bed.’ The little ones leaped and shouted and laugh’d And all the hills echoed.

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, You’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feathers a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

The Rose Have you ever loved a rose, and watched her slowly bloom; and as her petals would unfold, you grew drunk on her perfume. Have you ever seen her dance, her leaves all wet with dew; and quivered with a new romance— the wind, he loved her too. Have you ever longed for her, on nights that go on and on; for now, her face is all a blur, like a memory kept too long. Have you ever loved a rose, and bled against her thorns; and swear each night to let her go, then love her more by dawn.

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs. Does she want more than that –more of him? Does she want the whole picture?

The shadows of leaves fall upon their arms, as they spread the branches apart, but their shoulders are in the sun. The skin of their arms is like a blue mist, but their shoulders are white and glowing, as if the light fell not from above, but rose from under their skin. We watch the leaf which has fallen upon their shoulder and it lies at the curve of their neck, and a drop of dew glistens upon it like a jewel.

The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.

The forest stretched away before him. Beneath his paws he could feel the crisp crackle of newly fallen leaves. Silverpelt glittered in the sky like morning dew scattered on black fur.

There is no pleasure like leaving before dawn in last night's clothes. Light snow or thick dew in the grass- no one's passed this way before. The note you left needed only a few words, no explanation where lies could creep in. Your eyes, blinked clear, won't squint or glance off, it's the stars that turn their faces away. He or she is or is not the one you love and you cannot stay. The dark turns to mist and the mist cannot stay but for once there's no need for alarm. You're getting a good head start. Maybe the world isn't made of dust. Maybe you won't make another mistake. You're as young as you'll ever be.

Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don't be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.

As soon as that majestic force, which had already pierced me once before I had outgrown my childhood, struck my eyes, I turned to my left with the confidence a child has running to his mamma when he is afraid or in distress to say to Virgil: 'Not a single drop of blood remains in me that does not tremble-- I know the signs of the ancient flame.' But Virgil had departed, leaving us bereft: Virgil, sweetest of fathers, Virgil, to whom I gave myself for my salvation. And not all our ancient mother lost could save my cheeks, washed in the dew, from being stained again with tears.

Never and never, my girl riding far and near In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep, Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood, Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap, My dear, my dear, Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year, To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack's roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why her particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond with its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack's alley, all right. "Here's something for you, Jack," Miriam said. You'll appreciate this. Beckett describes tears as 'liquified brain.' "God, Miriam," Jack said. "Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it's a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!

An aphrodisiac will disappear, delusional, like permanence or wealth - a shimmering, as if love were a ghost - and yet my passion for you seethes and sears without an end. Late April leaves can’t crave caress of dew, sunlight’s sweet splash, more than I pine for your embrace, us turned to one; when harsh reversals scar, the thought of you will salve like summer wind in autumn; deep red blood surging along with mine, staid genes worked hot from your electric charms, as all my moods succumb to your sweet fire, and perfect wit. Now you are all I live for - loving you - in fleeting world of lies, you are the truth.

It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with gray-turning, gold-turning light. The Shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day.

The low early sunshine was streaming through the wood and the grass was grey with dew and the cobwebs were like silver. Just beside them was a little, very dark-wooded tree, about the size of an apple tree. The leaves were whitish and rather papery, like the herb called honesty, and it was loaded with little brown fruits that looked rather like dates.

I knew how she smelled, and I knew how she acted in front of me, and I knew how she acted in front of others, and I knew that she liked Mountain Dew and adventure and dramatic gestures, and I knew that she was funny and smart and just generally more than the rest of us. But I didn't know what brought her here, or what kept her here, or what made her leave.

Love Letter" Not easy to state the change you made. If I'm alive now, then I was dead, Though, like a stone, unbothered by it, Staying put according to habit. You didn't just tow me an inch, no- Nor leave me to set my small bald eye Skyward again, without hope, of course, Of apprehending blueness, or stars. That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake Masked among black rocks as a black rock In the white hiatus of winter- Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure In the million perfectly-chisled Cheeks alighting each moment to melt My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears, Angels weeping over dull natures, But didn't convince me. Those tears froze. Each dead head had a visor of ice. And I slept on like a bent finger. The first thing I was was sheer air And the locked drops rising in dew Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay Dense and expressionless round about. I didn't know what to make of it. I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded To pour myself out like a fluid Among bird feet and the stems of plants. I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once. Tree and stone glittered, without shadows. My finger-length grew lucent as glass. I started to bud like a March twig: An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg. From stone to cloud, so I ascended. Now I resemble a sort of god Floating through the air in my soul-shift Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.

A clammy dew is beading on my brow, At mere remembering her pale laugh, and curse. “Ha! ha! Sir Dainty! there must be a nurse Made of rose leaves and thistledown, express, To cradle thee my sweet, and lull thee: yes, I am too flinty-hard for thy nice touch: My tenderest squeeze is but a giant’s clutch.

My mother used to say that we'll all have three death: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.

In my defense I have only silence, dew on the grass, a nightingale among the branches. You forgive it, its long tenure in the leaves of one aspen after another, drops of eternity, grams of amazement, and the sleepy complaints of the poor poets

DD/MM/YYYY was not an ordinary day. Early in the morning, before the sunrise, a Baby Girl Fairy was dropped from the Fairy Lands to the Earth. There were songs of joys and rejoices everywhere. Cool breeze was playing and running across the meadows. Dew drops were dancing and floating over the leaves. Birds were swaying and singing in chorus: "Happy Birthday Happy Birthday Happy Birthday (Name), Happy Birthday Happy Birthday Happy Birthday to you.

New grass, you don't even know where to sprout and grow. How can I, a drop of dew, vanish away in the air leaving you alone?

Listen to the night wind in the trees, Listen to the summer grass singing; Listen to the time that’s tripping by, And the dawn dew falling. Listen to the moon as it climbs the sky, Listen to the pebbles humming; Listen to the mist in the trembling leaves, And the silence calling.

The witch approached it and pared its edges with a sword that she drew from her thigh. Then she sat down beside it on the earth and sang to it while it cooled. Not like the runes that enraged the flames was the song she sang to the sword: she whose curses had blasted the fire till it shrivelled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets. She sang of old Summer noons in the time of harebells: she sang on that high dark heath a song that seemed so full of mornings and evenings preserved with all their dews by her magical craft from days that had else been lost, that Alveric wondered of each small wandering wing, that her fire had lured from the dusk, if this were the ghost of some day lost to man, called up by the force of her song from times that were fairer.

If only it were possible to juicily belch up the life one's lived, chew it anew and gulp it down, and then once more to roll it with a fat, ox-like tongue, to squeeze from its eternal dregs the former sweetness of crisp grass, drunk with the morning dew and the bitterness of lilac leaves!

... WHEN ONE LOOKS INTO THE DARKNESS THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING THERE... Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose, Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre, Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep Men have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfold The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes Saw the pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise In Druid vapour and make the torches dim; Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him Who met Fand walking among flaming dew By a grey shore where the wind never blew, And lost the world and Emer for a kiss; And him who drove the gods out of their liss, And till a hundred morns had flowered red Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead; And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown Dwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods: And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods, And sought through lands and islands numberless years, Until he found, with laughter and with tears, A woman of so shining loveliness That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress, A little stolen tress. I, too, await The hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die? Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows, Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose? Out of sight is out of mind: Long have man and woman-kind, Heavy of will and light of mood, Taken away our wheaten food, Taken away our Altar stone; Hail and rain and thunder alone, And red hearts we turn to grey, Are true till time gutter away. ... the common people are always ready to blame the beautiful.

Upon the bank, she stood In the cool Of spent emotions. She felt, among the leaves, The dew Of old devotions. She walked upon the grass, Still quavering. The winds were like her maids, On timid feet, Fetching her woven scarves, Yet wavering.

Before the Dawn" But like love the archers are blind Upon the green night, the piercing saetas leave traces of warm lily. The keel of the moon breaks through purple clouds and their quivers fill with dew. Ay, but like love the archers are blind!

I'm comming to You. You are blazing. I'm giving You a rose. It embalms sweet. I'm givin a kiss... I melt of You. I melt and flow with You. Like an ice in a spring river. I melt and stay. Sun will vaporise us. It will take us up into clouds. And then we both will fall. Drop by drop. We'll fall out of the sky. We'll raise from dew to fog. Every sunny warm morning. We'll let the wind pull us with him. Cooling our selves in forest shadows. There in silence we'll cool off One from another. But in stormy days and nights. We'll billow and crash. One to another. Like crazy and wild. We'll churn into white foam. Ashore in sands we'll wait For the yellow october leaves Into them we'll fall asleep. We'll fall into and freeze. We'll freeze and melt again And flow and raise and fall again. Over and over again Even if we were in separete glasses of water. We would moove together and whisper. Even if in the oceans mixed. We would moove together and sing. I'm comming to You. You are blazing. I'm giving You a rose It embalms sweet. ... If I'll ever meet You. I' ll take our time... To dance dance dance dance with You...

But God, I don’t doubt You. I can see You in the morning, in the dew on the grass. Should I worship You in silence, without the obeisance and obedience to Your ministers? Should I stop singing and, within me, let my deeds speak of my belief and gratitude in Your greatness? The men who taught us of Your presence, who opened the doors of Your temple that I may see the light – they are white like You. Are You then the god of white people, and if we who are brown worship You, do we receive Your blessings as white men do? I pray that You be not white, that You be without color and that You be in all men because goodness cannot be encased only in white. I should worship then not a white god but someone brown like me. Pride tells me only one thing – that we are more than equal with those who rule us. Pride tells me that this land is mine, that they should leave me to my destiny, and if they will not leave, pride tells me that I should push them away and should they refuse this, I should vanquish them, kill them. I have known long ago that their blood is the same as mine. No stranger can come battering down my door and say he brings me light. This I have within me.

The first golden rays of morning’s light softly backlit the whole of this most intricate web, leaving morning’s dew generously sprinkling a thousand glistening points of light on each tender strand. But because it crossed the broad garden path, those ‘in a hurry’ saw it as an obstacle to where they were going, while those ‘on a journey’ saw it as a privilege that enhanced where they were going.

We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

The garden was in full verdure, and at Pokrovski nightingales had their homes on all sides in the thick shrubbery. Here and there, large clumps of lilacs raised their heads, enamelled with the white or pale purple of their opening flowers. The leaves in the birch alleys seemed transparent in the rays of the setting sun. The terrace lay in refreshing shade, and the light evening dew was gathering upon the grass.

De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (this excerpt inspired my book, The Persecution of Mildred Dunlap. Wilde wrote it to his lover while in prison.) When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realizing what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else – the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver – would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

Never and never, my girl riding far and near In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep, Fear or believe that the wolf in the sheepwhite hood Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap, my dear, my dear, Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

Thick grow the rush leaves, white dew turned to frost. He, who I love, must be somewhere along the shore.

The Genesis Of Butterflies The dawn is smiling on the dew that covers The tearful roses; lo, the little lovers That kiss the buds, and all the flutterings In jasmine bloom, and privet, of white wings, That go and come, and fly, and peep and hide, With muffled music, murmured far and wide. Ah, the Spring time, when we think of all the lays That dreamy lovers send to dreamy mays, Of the fond hearts within a billet bound, Of all the soft silk paper that pens wound, The messages of love that mortals write Filled with intoxication of delight, Written in April and before the May time Shredded and flown, playthings for the wind's playtime, We dream that all white butterflies above, Who seek through clouds or waters souls to love, And leave their lady mistress in despair, To flit to flowers, as kinder and more fair, Are but torn love-letters, that through the skies Flutter, and float, and change to butterflies

The best time to harvest herbs was after the early-morning dew dried, and Nellie had a long list of things to do, starting with her herb garden. While the sun rose higher and Richard kept sleeping, Nellie used her kitchen shears to trim leaves and stalks from her herb plants to later dry for her seasoning mix. Rosemary. Sage. Parsley. Dill. Lemon balm. Mint. Marjoram.

Like an ice in a spring river. I melt and stay. Sun will vaporise us. It will take us up into clouds. And then we both will fall. Drop by drop. We'll fall out of the sky. We'll raise from dew to fog. Every sunny warm morning. We'll let the wind pull us with him. Cooling our selves in forest shadows. There in silence we'll cool off One from another. But in stormy days and nights. We'll billow and crash. One to another. Like crazy and wild. We'll churn into white foam. Ashore in sands we'll wait For the yellow october leaves Into them we'll fall asleep. We'll fall into and freeze. We'll freeze and melt again And flow and raise and fall again. Over and over again Even if we were in separete glasses of water. We would moove together and whisper. Even if in the oceans mixed. We would moove together and sing. I'm comming to You. You are blazing. I'm giving You a rose It embalms sweet. ... If I'll ever meet You. I' ll take our time... To dance dance dance dance with You...

We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity--so much lower than that of daylight--makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.

Susan Baker,' she says to me, 'I hope you never light a fire with coal-oil. Or leave oily rags lying around, Susan. They have been known to cause spontaneous combustion in less than an hour. How would you like to stand and watch this house burn down, Susan, knowing it was your fault?' Well, Miss Dew dear, I had my laugh on her over that. It was that very night she set her curtains on fire and the yells of her are ringing in my ears yet.

I knew how she smelled, and I knew how she acted in front of me, and I knew how she acted in front of others, and I knew that she liked Mountain Dew and adventure and dramatic gestures, and I knew that she was funny and smart and just generally more than the rest of us. But I didn’t know what brought her here, or what kept her here, or what made her leave. I didn’t know why she owned thousands of records but never told anyone she even liked music. I didn’t know what she did at night, with the shades down, with the door locked, in the sealed privacy of her room. And maybe this was what I needed to do above all. I needed to discover what Margo was like when she wasn’t being Margo.

It was the day without a yesterday, and the world was so new the paint was still wet on the flowers, the meadows were wrapped up in a glossy cellophane of dew, and freshly budded leaves dangled like shiny price-tags from the trees.

Yesterday I stood at the temple door interrogating the passersby about the mystery and merit of Love. And before me passed an old man with an emaciated and melancholy face, who sighed and said: "Love is a natural weakness bestowed upon us by the first man." But a virile youth retorted: "Love joins our present with the past and the future." Then a woman with a tragic face sighed and said: "Love is a deadly poison injected by black vipers, that crawl from the caves of hell. The poison seems fresh as dew and the thirsty soul eagerly drinks it; but after the first intoxication the drinker sickens and dies a slow death." Then a beautiful, rosy-cheeked damsel smilingly said: "Love is a wine served by the brides of Dawn which strengthens strong souls and enables them to ascend to the stars." After her a black-robed, bearded man, frowning, said: "Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods." Then said a blind man, feeling his way with a cane: "Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from voiceless valleys." And a feeble ancient, dragging his feet like two rags, said, in quavering tones: "Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquility of the soul in the depth of Eternity." And a five-year-old child, after him, said laughing: "Love is my father and mother, and no one knows Love save my father and mother." And so, all who passed spoke of Love as the image of their hopes and frustrations, leaving it a mystery as before.

Mala faced her wall of faded cereus blooms. She was content. Oblivious to the dew that drizzled from the mudra, she rocked and dozed lightly. Scent, as though too shy for light, no longer trickled from the blossoms but Mala was not yet ready to leave the yard. Her eyes would flicker open and catch a glimpse of the day that was beginning to split the black sky apart. In that first orange light the flowers hung limp, battered and bruised, each one worn out from the frenzied carnival of moths. (140)

AWAKENING To open both your drowsy eyes, To stretch your limbs and realise That day is here. To watch the dancing, shifting beam Of sun, awake yet half in dream, Uncertain if the fitful gleam Be far or near. To turn with soft, contented sigh, And through the window watch the sky, All opal blue. To feel the air steal in the room, Made fragrant by the soft perfume Of lime-trees, when their scented bloom Is damp with dew. To hear the rustling voice of leaves, The chirp of birds beneath the eaves, But now awake. The tiny hum of timid things That fly with gauzy, fragile wings, Where yet the dusk to daylight clings, When mornings break. To feel the soul look forth and smile, Contented with each fruitful mile That it beholds. To hear the heart beat loud and strong, In unison with Nature's song, That echoes tremulous and long While dawn unfolds. To know yourself a thing complete, With strength of mind and limb replete, With vast desire; A creature made to dominate The lesser things of earth, a fate On whom the universe must wait, With force entire. And then to cry in deep delight God made the world and made it right; Dear Heaven above! Was ere completeness so complete, Was ever sweetness half so sweet, Was ever loving half so meet; Thank God for love.

I know the thrill of the grasses when the rain pours over them. I know the trembling of the leaves when the winds sweep through them. I know what the white clover felt as it held a drop of dew pressed close in its beauteousness. I know the quivering of the fragrant petals at the touch of the pollen-legged bees. I know what the stream said to the dipping willows, and what the moon said to the sweet lavender. I know what the stars said when they came stealthily down and crept fondly into the tops of the trees.

When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague...' My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word Prague with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were summer sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course-unrefreshed for ages by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth of morning. A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me; I would take it presently. ("The Lifted Veil")

The oldest wizards believe fire is made with the soul of dragons. That every ongoing flame is a sign that dragons still exist and likewise, if dragons were to end, the whole world would freeze in an instant. That is the reason why, in cold winter nights like this one, in which the frozen dews make it impossible for the villagers to gather and fills even the bravest of our warrior with fright to leave his hut, we keep the tradition of lighting every last torch in the village. For we know that, even in the worst winter, keeping the fire alive keeps alive our hopes of finding dragons once again

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee. Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green, That host with their banners at sunset were seen: Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown, That host on the morrow lay withered and strown. For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still! And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride; And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf, And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf. And there lay the rider distorted and pale, With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail: And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown. And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail, And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal; And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

George thrust into Alma's hand a lithograph of a spotted 'Catasetum.' The orchid had been rendered so magnificently that it seemed to grow off the page. Its lips were spotted red against yellow, and appeared moist, like living flesh. Its leaves were lush and thick, and its bulbous roots looked as though one could shake actual soil off them. Before Alma could thoroughly take in the beauty, George handed her another stunning print- a 'Peristeria barkeri,' with its tumbling golden blossoms so fresh they nearly trembled. Whoever had tinted this lithograph had been a master of texture as well as color; the petals resembled unshorn velvet, and touches of albumen on their tips gave each blossom a hint of dew. Then George handed her another print, and Alma could not help but gasp. Whatever this orchid was, Alma had never seen it before. Its tiny pink lobes looked like something a fairy would don for a fancy dress ball.

When you walk along a wooded path In the nature my heart held so dear, Remember the joy that it gave me And know that I’ll always be near. When a robin announces his presence Singing solo as day becomes new The doe lifts her head to listen As her fawn drinks the freshness of dew. When an otter glides through the river, His swim is a masterful one. He engages his mate in a playful chase Then they climb on the rocks to sun. When the rustling leaves touch the autumn sky, Boasting colors of russet and gold Geese wing on their southern-most journey To escape from the beckoning cold. When the North wind blows through the towering pines It delivers a mid winter’s chill While snowflakes drift softly on fresh frozen lakes And the call of the wild becomes still. In each of these things, remember me. And know that I’ll always be near. The woodlands, God’s wondrous Creation, In His nature my heart held so dear.

the first time I tried to leave him, he followed me home and said he loved me, weeping, on my doorstep. The next day, I told him I loved him too, and it was true for both of us, probably, but it was a shallow, watery love – born of repetition and resignation. It condensed on us like dew, only because we waited long enough.

O Thebes! garland yourself in all the green there is — ivy green, olive green, fennel green, growing green, yearning green, wet sap green, new grape green, green of youth and green of branches, green of mint and green of marsh grass, green of tea leaves, oak and pine, green of washed needles and early rain, green of weeds and green of oceans, green of bottles, ferns and apples, green of dawn-soaked dew and slender green of roots, green fresh out of pools, green slipped under fools, green of the green fuse, green of the honeyed muse, green of the rough caress of ritual, green undaunted by reason or delirium, green of jealous joy, green of the secret holy violence of the thyrsos, green of the sacred iridescence of the dancе — and let all the land of Thebes dance! with Dionysos leading, to the mountains! to the mountains! where the mob of women waits! They’ve forsaken their shuttles, they’ve left their looms, they’ve dropped their aprons and taken up their stations on Dionysos’ mountain!

Joy in the Woods There is joy in the woods just now, The leaves are whispers of song, And the birds make mirth on the bough And music the whole day long, And God! to dwell in the town In these springlike summer days, On my brow an unfading frown And hate in my heart always— A machine out of gear, aye, tired, Yet forced to go on—for I’m hired. Just forced to go on through fear, For every day I must eat And find ugly clothes to wear, And bad shoes to hurt my feet And a shelter for work-drugged sleep! A mere drudge! but what can one do? A man that’s a man cannot weep! Suicide? A quitter? Oh, no! But a slave should never grow tired, Whom the masters have kindly hired. But oh! for the woods, the flowers Of natural, sweet perfume, The heartening, summer showers And the smiling shrubs in bloom, Dust-free, dew-tinted at morn, The fresh and life-giving air, The billowing waves of corn And the birds’ notes rich and clear:— For a man-machine toil-tired May crave beauty too—though he’s hired.

This is what I am, I'll say, to leave this written excuse. This is my life. Now it is clear this couldn't be done- that in this net it's not just the strings that count but the air that escapes through the meshes. Everything else stayed out of reach- time running like a hare across the February dew, and love, best not to talk of love which moved, a swaying of hips, leaving no more trace of all its fire than a spoonful of ash. That's how it is with so many passing things: the man who waited, believing, of course, the woman who was alive and will not be. All of them believed that, having teeth, feet, hands, and language, life was only a matter of honor. This one took a look at history, took in all the victories of the past, assumed an everlasting existence, and the only thing life gave him was his death, time not to be alive, and earth to bury him in the end. But all that was born with as many eyes as there are planets in the firmament, and all her devouring fire ruthlessly devoured her until the end. If I remember anything in my life, it was an afternoon in India, on the banks of a river. They were burning a woman of flesh and bone and I didn't know if what came from the sarcophagus was soul or smoke, until there was neither woman nor fire nor coffin nor ash. It was late, and only the night, the water, the river, the darkness lived on in that death.

The air around me was damp, dew clinging to the grass and the leaves, and at the head of the grave the small star fruit tree, struggling out of being a seedling. I wasn’t sure why Aunty Kavita had picked a fruit tree that would feed on Vivek’s body. Uncle Chika probably would have selected something else, like a palm tree. Did she look forward to the day when it would actually have star fruits hanging from its branches? Would she pick them and eat them as if she was absorbing him, bringing him back inside where he’d come from? It would be something like Holy Communion, I imagined, body and blood turned into yellow flesh and pale green skin, bursting with juice. Or maybe she would never touch the fruit—maybe no one would—and they would fall back to the ground to rot, to sink back into the soil, until the roots of the tree took them back and it would just continue like that, around and around. Or birds would show up and eat the fruit, then carry Vivek around, giving life to things even after he’d run out of it himself.

The morning grass was damp and cool with dew. My yellow rain slicker must have looked sharp contrasted against the bright green that spring provided. I must have looked like an early nineteenth century romantic poet (Walt Whitman, perhaps?) lounging around a meadow celebrating nature and the glory of my existence. But don’t make this about me. Don’t you dare. This was about something bigger than me (by at least 44 feet). I was there to unselfishly throw myself in front of danger (nothing is scarier than a parked bulldozer), in the hopes of saving a tree, and also procuring a spot in a featured article in my local newspaper. It’s not about celebrity for me, it’s about showing that I care. It’s not enough to just quietly go about caring anymore. No, now we need the world to see that we care. I was just trying to do my part to show I was doing my part. But no journalists or TV news stations came to witness my selfless heroics. In fact, nobody came at all, not even Satan’s henchmen (the construction crew). People might scoff and say, “But it was Sunday.” Yes, it was Sunday. But if you’re a hero you can’t take a day off. I’d rather be brave a day early than a day late. Most cowards show up late to their destiny. But I always show up early, and quite often I leave early too, but at least I have the guts to lay down my life for something I’d die for. Now I only laid down my life for a short fifteen-minute nap, but I can forever hold my chin high as I loudly tell anyone who will listen to my exploits as an unsung hero (not that I haven’t written dozens of songs dedicated to my bravery). Most superheroes hide anonymously behind masks. That’s cowardly to me. I don’t wear a mask. And the only reason I’m anonymous is that journalists don’t respond to my requests for interviews, and when I hold press conferences nobody shows up, not even my own mother. The world doesn’t know all the good I’ve done for the world. And that’s fine with me. Not really. But if I have to go on being anonymous to make this world a better place, I will. But that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about changing my hours of altruism from 7-8 am Sunday mornings to 9-5 am Monday through Friday, and only doing deeds of greatness in crowded locations.

There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?

Her hair glowed. It shimmered and shone and pulsed, the full length of it flowing behind Rapunzel and lighting up the undersides of the trees and throwing soft illumination on all the paler leaves and mushrooms, gleaming for a moment where it hit a drop of dew or sap. The moths who had fled returned, like a fluttering train of silken flowers on a long, magical wedding veil, following the mesmerizing river of silver light.

But now this child has come offering us a way out and I’m going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing, we’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves, we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze, we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world which is our true home and always was.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.

In winter the thicket was dark, wet, shaggy and shivering, and allowed a glimpse of the house. Instead of blossom on the branches and dew on the blossom you saw the long silvery ribbon-trails of slugs on the cold thick carpet of yellow leaves. But always, in all its guises, in all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this tiny enclosure exuded melancholy, contemplation, solitude, freedom, the absence of man, the presence of God. And the rusty old gate seemed to say, 'This garden belongs to me.

People who live in big cities are deprieved, consciously or unconsciously, of those almost indefinable things on which our human sensitivity feeds, like the first breath of morning country air imperceptibly scented by dew; the glint of late afternoon sun through pale green leaves; the whiff of wood smoke or even the distant sound of barking carried across fields. A million little bonuses of nature are denied the city dweller, his subconscious is undernourished and his need for art is greater than that of country folk.

Sympathy There should be no despair for you While nightly stars are burning; While evening pours its silent dew, And sunshine gilds the morning. There should be no despair—though tears May flow down like a river: Are not the best beloved of years Around your heart for ever? They weep, you weep, it must be so; Winds sigh as you are sighing, And winter sheds its grief in snow Where Autumn's leaves are lying: Yet, these revive, and from their fate Your fate cannot be parted: Then, journey on, if not elate, Still, NEVER broken-hearted!

The scent of water, of the rain and of the dew. It was difficult to separate it from the grateful fragrance of the life it renewed, but it had its scent; the faint exhalation of its goodness. It would still come down upon the earth after man, destroying himself, had destroyed also the leaves and the grass. Its goodness might even renew again the face of the burnt and blasted earth. He did not know. But unlike Job’s comforters he believed there was a supreme goodness that could renew his own soul beyond this wasting sorrow of human life and death.

I Saw Thee Weep (From "Hebrew Melodies") I saw thee weep – the big bright tear Came o’er that eye of blue; And then methought it did appear A violet dropping dew: I see thee smile – the sapphire’s blaze Beside thee ceased to shine; It could not match the living rays That filled that glance of thine. As clouds from yonder sun receive A deep and mellow dye, Which scarce the shade of coming eve Can banish from the sky, Those smiles unto the moodiest mind Their own pure joy impart; Their sunshine leaves a glow behind That lightens o’er the heart.

The fanciest grade of green tea in Japan goes by the name of gyokuro, meaning "jade dew." It consists of the newest leaves of a tea plantation's oldest tea bushes that bud in May and have been carefully protected from the sun under a double canopy of black nylon mesh. The leaves are then either steeped in boiled water or ground into a powder to make matcha (literally, "grind tea"), the thick tea served at a tea ceremony. (The powder used to make the thin tea served at a tea ceremony comes from grinding the older leaves of young tea plants, resulting in a more bitter-tasting tea.) The middle grade of green tea is called sencha, or "brew tea," and is made from the unprotected young tea leaves that unfurl in May or June. The leaves are usually steeped in hot water to yield a fragrant grassy brew to enjoy on special occasions or in fancy restaurants. For everyday tea, the Japanese buy bancha. Often containing tiny tea twigs, it consists of the large, coarse, unprotected leaves that remain on the tea bush until August. When these leaves are roasted, they become a popular tea called hojicha. When hojicha combines with popped roasted brown rice, a tea called genmaicha results.

From Vergil's Tenth Eclogue Verses 1-26. Published by Rossetti, "Complete Poetical Works of P. B. S.", 1870, from the Boscombe manuscripts now in the Bodleian. Mr. Locock ("Examination", etc., 1903, pages 47-50), as the result of his collation of the same manuscripts, gives a revised and expanded version which we print below. Melodious Arethusa, o'er my verse Shed thou once more the spirit of thy stream: Who denies verse to Gallus? So, when thou Glidest beneath the green and purple gleam Of Syracusan waters, mayst thou flow Unmingled with the bitter Doric dew! Begin, and, whilst the goats are browsing now The soft leaves, in our way let us pursue The melancholy loves of Gallus. List! We sing not to the dead: the wild woods knew His sufferings, and their echoes... Young Naiads,...in what far woodlands wild Wandered ye when unworthy love possessed Your Gallus? Not where Pindus is up-piled, Nor where Parnassus' sacred mount, nor where Aonian Aganippe expands... The laurels and the myrtle-copses dim. The pine-encircled mountain, Maenalus, The cold crags of Lycaeus, weep for him; And Sylvan, crowned with rustic coronals, Came shaking in his speed the budding wands And heavy lilies which he bore: we knew Pan the Arcadian. ... 'What madness is this, Gallus? Thy heart's care With willing steps pursues another there

These are the things I cannot imagine, and I realize that I cannot imagine them because I didn't know Margo. I knew how she smelled, and I knew how she acted in front of me, and I knew how she acted in front of others, and I knew that she liked Mountain Dew and adventures and dramatic gestures, and I knew that she was funny and smart and just generally more than the rest of us. But I didn't know what brought her here, or what kept her here, or what made her leave. I didn't know why she owned thousands of records but never told anyone she even liked music. I didn't know what she did at night, with the shades down, with the door locked, in the sealed privacy of her room.

For the first time in my life, I felt I could truly see through God’s eyes and feel what He felt. I could see the homeless and feel the sting of reproach in which they lived their lives. I could see my brother striving for acceptance and love from my father and feeling the pain of his constant rejection. I could see the popular girls at school and feel their emptiness and desire to have more than outward beauty. I could see creation—the flowers, the birds in the air, the smell of the morning dew—and feel the joy of my Father in heaven delighting in His creation. This compassion was definitely something I had never experienced before until my commitment to follow Christ.

Ode to a Cluster of Violets Crisp cluster plunged in shadow. Drops of violet water and raw sunlight floated up with your scent. A fresh subterranean beauty climbed up from your buds thrilling my eyes and my life. One at a time, flowers that stretched forward silvery stalks, creeping closer to an obscure light shoot by shoot in the shadows, till they crowned the mysterious mass with an intense weight of perfume and together formed a single star with a far-off scent and a purple center. Poignant cluster intimate scent of nature, you resemble a wave, or a head of hair, or the gaze of a ruined water nymph sunk in the depths. But up close, in your fragrance’s blue brazenness, you exhale the earth, an earthly flower, an earthen smell and your ultraviolet gleam in volcanoes’ faraway fires. Into your loveliness I sink a weathered face, a face that dust has often abused. You deliver something out of the soil. It isn’t simply perfume, nor simply the perfect cry of your entire color, no: it’s a word sprinkled with dew, a flowering wetness with roots. Fragile cluster of starry violets, tiny, mysterious planet of marine phosphorescence, nocturnal bouquet nestled in green leaves: the truth is there is no blue word to express you. Better than any word is the pulse of your scent. Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things. (Bulfinch; Bilingual edition May 1, 1994) Originally published 1961.

The Same (As revised by Mr. C.D. Locock.) Melodious Arethusa, o'er my verse Shed thou once more the spirit of thy stream: (Two lines missing.) Who denies verse to Gallus? So, when thou Glidest beneath the green and purple gleam Of Syracusan waters, mayest thou flow Unmingled with the bitter Dorian dew! Begin, and whilst the goats are browsing now The soft leaves, in our song let us pursue The melancholy loves of Gallus. List! We sing not to the deaf: the wild woods knew His sufferings, and their echoes answer... Young Naiades, in what far woodlands wild Wandered ye, when unworthy love possessed Our Gallus? Nor where Pindus is up-piled, Nor where Parnassus' sacred mount, nor where Aonian Aganippe spreads its... (Three lines missing.) The laurels and the myrtle-copses dim, The pine-encircled mountain, Maenalus, The cold crags of Lycaeus weep for him. (Several lines missing.) 'What madness is this, Gallus? thy heart's care, Lycoris, mid rude camps and Alpine snow, With willing step pursues another there.' (Some lines missing.) And Sylvan, crowned with rustic coronals, Came shaking in his speed the budding wands And heavy lilies which he bore: we knew Pan the Arcadian with.... ...and said, 'Wilt thou not ever cease? Love cares not. The meadows with fresh streams, the bees with thyme, The goats with the green leaves of budding spring Are saturated not—nor Love with tears.

The rustling of leaves under the feet in woods and under hedges; The crumpling of cat-ice and snow down wood-rides, narrow lanes, and every street causeway; Rustling through a wood or rather rushing, while the wind halloos in the oak-toop like thunder; The rustle of birds’ wings startled from their nests or flying unseen into the bushes; The whizzing of larger birds overhead in a wood, such as crows, puddocks, buzzards; The trample of robins and woodlarks on the brown leaves, and the patter of squirrels on the green moss; The fall of an acorn on the ground, the pattering of nuts on the hazel branches as they fall from ripeness; The flirt of the groundlark’s wing from the stubbles- how sweet such pictures on dewy mornings, when the dew flashes from its brown feathers.

Hear that? Living skulls! What are we doing here? What war at Troy? Does anyone care? Gods of love and hate! Aren't they the same god? All of us, all our lives, searching for the one perfect enemy- you, me, Helen, Paris, Menelaos, all those crazy Greeks! all those hapless Trojans! my dear beloved Jack! Jack and I fought all the time. I remember almost nothing but the fights - every fight a war to end all wars, you know how it goes, a righteous war, a final war, the worst fight you've ever had, you can't do this again, this time you'll get things straight one way or the other or it's over, he'll see what you mean, see you're right, fights aren't about anything except being right, are they? once and for all. You feel old. Wrong. Clumsy. You sit in two chairs on the porch. Or the kitchen. Or the front hall. Hell arrives. It's as if the war was already there, waiting, the two of you poured into it like wet concrete. The chairs you sit in are the wrong chairs, they're the chairs you never sit in because they're so uncomfortable, you keep thinking you should move but you don't, your neck hurts, you hate your neck, evening closes in. Birds move about the yard. Hell yawns. War pours out of both of you, steaming and stinking. You rush backward from it and become children, every still sentence slamming you back into the child you still are, every sentence not what you meant to say at all but the meaning keeps flaring and contracting, as sparks drop on gasoline, Fuckshit this! Fuckshit that! no reason to live. You're getting vertigo. He's being despicable. Your mother was like this. Stop whimpering. No use asking, What is this about? Don't leave the room. I have to leave the room. Breathless, blaming, I'm not blaming! How is this not blaming! Hours pass or do they. You say the same things or are they different things? Hell smells stale. Fights aren't about anything, fights are about themselves. You're stiff. You hate these chairs. Nothing is resolved. It is too dark to see. You both go to bed and doze slightly, touching slightly. In the night a nightmare. Some giant bird, or insect, some flapping thing, trying to settle on the back of your neck, you can't see what it is or get it off. Pure fear. Scream unearthly. He jerks you awake. Oh sweetie, he says. He is using his inside voice, his most inside voice. The distance between that voice and the fight voice measures your whole world. How can a voice change so. You are saved. He has saved you. He sees you saved. An easement occurs, as night dew on leaves. And yet (you think suddenly) you yourself do not possess sort of inside voice - no wonder he's lonely. You this cannot offer this refuge, cannot save him, not ever, and, although physiological in origin, or genetic, or who knows, you understand the lack is felt by him as a turning away. No one can heal this. You both decide without words to just - skip it. You grip one another. In the night, in the silence, the grip slowly loosens and silence washes you out somewhere onto a shore of sleep. Morning arrives. Troy is still there. You hear from below the clatter of everyone putting on their armour. You go to the window.

I began by preparing my pasta: my deft fingers forming the intricate shapes of rigatoni, ravioli, spiralli, spaghetti, cannelloni, and linguini. Then I would brew sauces of sardines, or anchovies or zucchini or sheep's cheeses, of saffron, pine nuts, currants, and fennel. These I would simmer in the huge iron cauldrons, which were constantly bubbling above the fire. My pasta dishes, I have to say, were famous throughout the province, and the scent of my sauces carried by the breeze was sufficient to fill a poor man's stomach. I also kneaded bread and produced the finest pane rimacinato, the most delicious ciabatta and focaccia that had ever been tasted in the region. Sometimes I would add wild thyme to the dough, or fragrant rosemary; plucked fresh from the hedgerow, with the dew still on the leaves.

Sunday Morning V She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love Whispered a little out of tenderness, She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. VI Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang? Why set the pear upon those river-banks Or spice the shores with odors of the plum? Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. VII Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. And whence they came and whither they shall go The dew upon their feet shall manifest. VIII She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay." We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings

Temperance Dews stood with quiet confidence, a respectable women who lived in the sewer that was St. Giles. Her eyes had widened at the sight of Lazarus, but she made no move to flee. Indeed, finding a strange man in her pathetic sitting room seemed not to frighten her at all. Interesting. “I am Lazarus Huntington, Lord Caire,” he said. “I know. What are you doing here?” He tilted his head, studying her. She knew him, yet did not recoil in horror? Yes, she’d do quite well. “I’ve come to make a proposition to you, Mrs. Dews.” Still no sign of fear, though she eyed the doorway. “You’ve chosen the wrong woman, my lord. The night is late. Please leave my house.” No fear and no deference to his rank. An interesting woman indeed. “My proposition is not, er, illicit in nature,” he drawled. “In fact, it’s quite respectable. Or nearly so.” She sighed, looked down at her tray, and then back up at him. “Would you like a cup of tea?” He almost smiled. Tea? When had he last been offered something so very prosaic by a woman? He couldn’t remember. But he replied gravely enough. “Thank you, no.” She nodded. “Then if you don’t mind?” He waved a hand to indicate permission. She set the tea tray on the wretched little table and sat on the padded footstool to pour herself a cup. He watched her. She was a monochromatic study. Her dress, bodice, hose, and shoes were all flat black. A fichu tucked in at her severe neckline, an apron, and cap—no lace or ruffles—were all white. No color marred her aspect, making the lush red of her full lips all the more startling. She wore the clothes of a nun, yet had the mouth of a sybarite. The contrast was fascinating—and arousing. “You’re a Puritan?” he asked. Her beautiful mouth compressed. “No.

The great danger of lying is not that lies are untruths, and thus unreal, but that they become real in other people's minds. They escape the liar's grip like seeds let loose in the wind, sprouting a life of their own in the least expected places, until one day the liar finds himself contemplating a lonely but nonetheless healthy tree, grown off the side of a barren cliff. It has the capacity to sadden him as much as it does to amaze. How could that tree have got there? How does it manage to live? It is extraordinarily beautiful in its loneliness, built on a barren untruth, yet green and very much alive. Many years have passed since I sowed the lies, and thus lives, of which I am speaking. Yet more than ever, I shall have to sort the branches out carefully, determine which ones stemmed from truth, which from falsehood. Will it be possible to saw off the misleading branches without mutilating the tree beyond hope? Perhaps I should rather uproot the tree, replant it in flat, fertile soil. But the risk is great. My tree has adapted in a hundred and one ways to its untruth, learned to bend with the wind, live with little water. It leans so far it is horizontal, a green enigma halfway up and perpendicular to a tall, lifeless cliff. Yet it is not lying on the ground, its leaves rotting in dew as it would if I replanted it. Curved trunks cannot stand up, any more than I can straighten my posture to return to my twenty-year-old self. A milder environment, after so long a harsh one, would surely prove fatal. I have found the solution. If I simply tell the truth, the cliff will erode chip by chip, stone by stone. And the destiny of my tree? I hold my fist to the sky and let loose my prayers. Wherever they go, I hope my tree will land there.

WITHOUT A DOG A man may have his share of gold, Though hard to get, and hard to hold, May even have a little fame, Although they soon forget your name, May even have a little bliss, The rapture of a faithless kiss, And yet, the while the world you jog, Life isn’t much without a dog. Life gives him friends a-plenty, friends As many as the coins he spends, Yet, when he has a trail to go Up hill, down dale, through rain or snow, One, only one, will rise and leave The good red fire, grieve when yoy grieve Go where you go, the peak, the bog- Life isn’t much without a dog. Unless a man can say, “Come, Jack,” ‘ Come Sport or Scotty, life will lack The only love man ever knew That would not vanish like the dew, To evry man must come a day When he must walk some hurt away, And, in that hour of doubt, of fog, Life isn’t much without a dog. —DOUGLAS MALLOCH

What joy it was to lose myself in that garden of flowers, to wander happily from spot to spot, until, coming suddenly upon a beautiful vine, I recognized it by its leaves and blossoms, and knew it was the vine which covered the tumble-down summer-house at the farther end of the garden! Here, also, were trailing clematis, drooping jessamine, and some rare sweet flowers called butterfly lilies, because their fragile petals resemble butterflies' wings. But the roses—they were loveliest of all. Never have I found in the greenhouses of the North such heart-satisfying roses as the climbing roses of my southern home. They used to hang in long festoons from our porch, filling the whole air with their fragrance, untainted by any earthy smell; and in the early morning, washed in the dew, they felt so soft, so pure, I could not help wondering if they did not resemble the asphodels of God's garden.

Tell me not here, it needs not saying, What tune the enchantress plays In aftermaths of soft September Or under blanching mays, For she and I were long acquainted And I knew all her ways. On russet floors, by waters idle, The pine lets fall its cone; The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing In leafy dells alone; And traveler's joy beguiles in autumn Hearts that have lost their own. On acres of the seeded grasses The changing burnish heaves; Or marshalled under moons of harvest Stand still all night the sheaves; Or beeches strip in storms for winter And stain the wind with leaves. Possess, as I possessed a season, The countries I resign, Where over elmy plains the highway Would mount the hills and shine, And full of shade the pillared forest Would murmur and be mine. For nature, heartless, witless nature, Will neither care nor know What stranger's feet may find the meadow And trespass there and go, Nor ask amid the dews of morning If they are mine or no.

Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get into the closest relations possible. Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful; and fit, with help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted on, and be kept in kings’ palaces. But such artificial consistence is not its best. Leave it still quiet to follow its own instinct of unity, and it becomes not only white, but clear; not only clear, but hard; not only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only, refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire. Such being the consummation of the clay, we give similar permission of quiet to the sand. It also becomes, first, a white earth, then proceeds to grow clear and hard, and at last arranges itself in mysterious, infinitely fine, parallel lines, which have the power of reflecting not merely the blue rays, but the blue, green, purple, and red rays in the greatest beauty in which they can be seen through any hard material whatsoever. We call it then an opal. In next order the soot sets to work; it cannot make itself white at first, but instead of being discouraged, tries harder and harder, and comes out clear at last, and the hardest thing in the world; and for the blackness that it had, obtains in exchange the power of reflecting all the rays of the sun at once in the vividest blaze that any solid thing can shoot. We call it then a diamond. Last of all the water purifies or unites itself, contented enough if it only reach the form of a dew-drop; but if we insist on its proceeding to a more perfect consistence, it crystallizes into the shape of a star. And for the ounce of slime which we had by political economy of competition, we have by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire, an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow.

Dear God, I love this tree. I love the light filtering through the moss and the leaves. I love all your earth songs—the breeze rustling through the grass, the rhythm of crickets, the beating of wings. I love the rain water in the bird bath and the dragonflies that flit over it. I love the air so laden with moisture that the dew rains out of the tree and bathes my face. I love the artistic little prayers that the spiders weave through the woods. I love the way you blend daylight into darkness, how dusk softens the sharp edges of the world. I love the way the moon changes shape every night. I love the slope of your hills—horizons inside and out. I feel that I’m part of it, that it’s part of me. Here, surrounded and permeated by your creation, I feel you. I feel life. I know myself connected. O God, is there anything you’ve made that can’t pour life and healing into me? When I think of the simplicity and extravagance of creation, I want to bend down and write the word yes across the earth so that you can see it.

Outside, the fields were shaking off their sleep and the first rays of sunlight were cutting the peaks of the cordillera like the thrusts of a saber, warming up the earth and evaporating the dew into a fine white foam that blurred the edges of things and turned the landscape into an enchanted dream. Blanca set off in the direction of the river. Everything was still quiet. Her footsteps crushed the fallen leaves and the dry branches, producing a light crunching sound, the only noise in that vast sleeping space. She felt that the shaggy meadows, the golden wheatfields, and the far-off purple mountains disappearing in the clear morning sky were part of some ancient memory, something she had seen before exactly like this, as if she had already lived this moment in some previous life. The delicate rain of the night had soaked the earth and trees, and her clothing felt slightly damp, her shoes cold. She inhaled the perfume of the drenched earth, the rotten leaves, and the humus, which awakened an unknown pleasure in all her senses.

Blaine: WOULD YOU TRY ME WITH RIDDLES FROM YOUR BOOK? OUR TIME TOGETHER GROWS SHORT. Jake: Yes. I would try you with these riddles. Give me your understanding of the truth concerning each, Blaine. Blaine: IT IS FAIRLY SPOKEN, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I WILL DO AS YOU ASK. Jake: Listen, Blaine. In a tunnel of darkness lies a beast of iron. It can only attack when pulled back. What is it? Blaine: (without hesitation) A BULLET. Jake: Walk on the living, they don't even mumble. Walk on the dead, they mutter and grumble. What are they? Blaine: (without hesitation) FALLEN LEAVES. If Jake really knew in his heart that the game was lost, why did he feel such despair, such bitterness, such anger? Jake: (in his mind) Because he's a pain, that's why. Blaine is a really BIG pain, and I'd like to push his face in it, just once. I think even making him stop is second to that on my wish-list. (to Blaine) I am emeralds and diamonds, lost by the moon. I am found by the sun and picked up soon. What am I? Blaine: (still relentless, still unhesitating) DEW.

It embalms sweet. I'm givin a kiss... I melt of You. I melt and flow with You. Like an ice in a spring river. I melt and stay. Sun will vaporise us. It will take us up into clouds. And then we both will fall. Drop by drop. We'll fall out of the sky. We'll raise from dew to fog. Every sunny warm morning. We'll let the wind pull us with him. Cooling our selves in forest shadows. There in silence we'll cool off One from another. But in stormy days and nights. We'll billow and crash. One to another. Like crazy and wild. We'll churn into white foam. Ashore in sands we'll wait For the yellow october leaves Into them we'll fall asleep. We'll fall into and freeze. We'll freeze and melt again And flow and raise and fall again. Over and over again Even if we were in separete glasses of water. We would moove together and whisper. Even if in the oceans mixed. We would moove together and sing. I'm comming to You. You are blazing. I'm giving You a rose It embalms sweet. ... If I'll ever meet You. I' ll take our time... To dance dance dance dance with You...

An Apple Gathering I plucked pink blossoms from mine apple-tree And wore them all that evening in my hair: Then in due season when I went to see I found no apples there. With dangling basket all along the grass As I had come I went the selfsame track: My neighbours mocked me while they saw me pass So empty-handed back. Lilian and Lilias smiled in trudging by, Their heaped-up basket teased me like a jeer; Sweet-voiced they sang beneath the sunset sky, Their mother's home was near. Plump Gertrude passed me with her basket full, A stronger hand than hers helped it along; A voice talked with her through the shadows cool More sweet to me than song. Ah Willie, Willie, was my love less worth Than apples with their green leaves piled above? I counted rosiest apples on the earth Of far less worth than love. So once it was with me you stooped to talk Laughing and listening in this very lane: To think that by this way we used to walk We shall not walk again! I let me neighbours pass me, ones and twos And groups; the latest said the night grew chill, And hastened: but I loitered, while the dews Fell fast I loitered still.

It has been a thousand years since I started trekking the earth A huge travel in night’s darkness from the Ceylonese waters to the Malayan sea I have been there too: the fading world of Vimbisara and Asoka Even further—the forgotten city of Vidarva, Today I am a weary soul although the ocean of life around continues to foam, Except for a few soothing moments with Natore’s Banalata Sen. Her hair as if the dark night of long lost Vidisha, Her face reminiscent of the fine works of Sravasti, When I saw her in the shadow it seemed as if a ship-wrecked mariner in a far away sea has spotted a cinnamon island lined with greenish grass. “Where had you been lost all these days? ” yes, she demanded of me, Natore’s Banalata Sen raising her eyes of profound refuge. At the day’s end evening crawls in like the sound of dews, The kite flaps off the smell of sun from its wings. When all colours take leave from the world except for the flicker of the hovering fireflies The manuscript is ready with tales to be told All birds come home, rivers too, All transactions of the day being over Nothing remains but darkness to sit face to face with Banalata Sen.

Almost Out Of The Sky" Almost out of the sky, half of the moon anchors between two mountains. Turning, wandering night, the digger of eyes. Let’s see how many stars are smashed in the pool. It makes a cross of mourning between my eyes, and runs away. Forge of blue metals, nights of stilled combats, my heart revolves like a crazy wheel. Girl who have come from so far, been brought from so far, sometimes your glance flashes out under the sky. Rumbling, storm, cyclone of fury, you cross above my heart without stopping. Wind from the tombs carries off, wrecks, scatters your sleepy root. The big trees on the other side of her, unprooted. But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel. You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves. Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration, ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything. Longing that sliced my breast into pieces, it is time to take another road, on which she does not smile. Storm that buries the bells, muddy swirl of torments, why touch her now, why make her sad. Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew

Statement Preliminary to the Invention of Solace Whether they bend as compliantly as black leaves Curved and hanging in the heavy dew in the grey dawn, Or whether they wait as motionless as ice-coated Insects and spears of roots on a northern cliff; Whether they tighten once like the last white edge Of primrose taken suddenly skyward By a gust of frost, or swallow as hard as stones Careened and scattered by a current of river; Whether they mourn by the bright light of grief Running like a spine of grass straight through the sound Of their songs, or whether they fall quietly Through indefinite darkness like a seed of sorrel Bound alive beneath snow; whether they mourn in multitudes, blessed like a congregation of winter forest moaning for the white drifting children of storms they can never remember, or whether they grieve separately, divided even from themselves, parted like golden plovers blown and calling over a buffeted sea; something must come to them, something as clear and fair and continuous as the eye of the bluegill open in calm water, something as silent as the essential spaces of breath heard inside the voice naming all of their wishes, something touching them in the same way the sun deep in the pit of the pear touches the spring sky by the light of its own leaf. A comfort understood like that must be present now and possible.

Clouds, unrolling like carpets, spreading, trailing wisps and rag-ends, rushed towards a point near mid-heaven, dampening the dayblue sky to a pearl-gray from which the translucence slowly ebbed, as additional layers were healed above, banking, mounting higher, pressing lower, darkening, dining, hazing the outlines of trees and Rocky heights, transforming the lower figures of men and animals into shifting things a quarter of shadow and going for half, while the rains were yet withheld, the mists rolled and rose, dew came afresh to the grasses, windows were filmed and beaded, moisture collected, ran upon, dripped from leaves, sounds came distorted, as though the entire world had been bedded in cotton, birds flew near to the ground in their courses toward the hills, the wings died down and caressed, small animals paused, raised their muzzles, turned them slowly, shook themselves, cocked their heads, then moved was if seeking some hidden Ark, beyond the foothills, in the mist, above the places the searchers combed, and the thunder held its breath, the lightning stayed its stroke, the rain remained unshed, the temperature slipped downward, cloud feel upon cloud and, super drawn from the spectrum, the colors drained out of the world, leaving behind a newsreel frame or the impression of a cave, shadows sliding on it's farther walls, changing, irregular, wet.

Straight off, we were in the country. It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys lying spread out below, with streams winding through them, and island groves of trees here and there, and huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching away in billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we knew was a castle. We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew, and we moved like spirits, the cushioned turf giving out no sound of footfall; we dreamed along through glades in a mist of green light that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of runlets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of whispering music, comfortable to hear; and at times we left the world behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest, where furtive wild things whisked and scurried by and were gone before you could even get your eye on the place where the noise was; and where only the earliest birds were turning out and getting to business with a song here and a quarrel yonder and a mysterious far-off hammering and drumming for worms on a tree trunk away somewhere in the impenetrable remotenesses of the woods. And by and by out we would swing again into the glare.

they felt like they were informed. It was a fine line--too much information led to more interrogation and too little information leads to major snooping. Thrace believed that I had developed the rare ability to express something while revealing nothing. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that a sorcerer with laughing hazel eyes might have the ability to see beyond all my fine lines. I smiled at that whimsical thought as I finished my pot roast and parental interrogation.   Chapter 2: Mortal Combat   I woke up groggy because I set my alarm for a half hour earlier than usual to get ready to work out. I don’t know why I did that. Ok. I might know why I did that, but 6:00am was too early for rational thought. I kept my outfit simple with black yoga pants and a retro Offspring tee. It was much more difficult to get my thick auburn hair to calm down after a night of restless sleep. Luckily, I didn’t get any zits overnight which would have been just my luck. After some leave-in conditioner and some shine spray, I hoped my hair no longer looked like a bird’s nest. I headed downstairs just in time to see my dad coming from the kitchen with his coffee, my Mt. Dew, and Zone bar. Hello, my name is Calliope, and I am an addict. My drug is caffeine. I like my caffeine cold usually in the fountain pop variety—Mt. Dew in the morning and Diet Dr. Pepper in the afternoon. I like the ice and carbonation, but in the morning on the way to work out, I’ll take what I can get. I thanked my dad for my version of breakfast as we walked to the car. He only grunted his reply. We slid into the white Taurus and headed to the YMCA. I actually started to get nervous, as we got closer. We were at the Y before I was mentally prepared. I sighed and lumbered out of the car. As we walked in and headed toward opposite locker rooms, dad announced, “Meet you back here in an hour, Calli.

He embraced her. And touched her. And found her. Yennefer, in some astonishing way hard and soft at the same time, sighed loudly. The words they had uttered broke off, perished among the sighs and quickened breaths, ceased to have any meaning and were dissipated. So they remained silent, and focused on the search for one another, on the search for the truth. They searched for a long time, lovingly and very thoroughly, fearful of needless haste, recklessness and nonchalance. They searched vigorously, intensively and passionately, fearful of needless self-doubt and indecision. They searched cautiously, fearful of needless tactlessness. They found one another, conquered their fear and, a moment later, found the truth, which exploded under their eyelids with a terrible, blinding clarity, tore apart the lips pursed in determination with a moan. Then time shuddered spasmodically and froze, everything vanished, and touch became the only functioning sense. An eternity passed, reality returned and time shuddered once more and set off again, slowly, ponderously, like a great, fully laden cart. Geralt looked through the window. The moon was still hanging in the sky, although what had just happened ought in principle to have struck it down from the sky. ‘Oh heavens, oh heavens,’ said Yennefer much later, slowly wiping a tear from her cheek. They lay still among the dishevelled sheets, among thrills, among steaming warmth and waning happiness and among silence, and all around whirled vague darkness, permeated by the scent of the night and the voices of cicadas. Geralt knew that, in moments like this, the enchantress’s telepathic abilities were sharpened and very powerful, so he thought about beautiful matters and beautiful things. About things which would give her joy. About the exploding brightness of the sunrise. About fog suspended over a mountain lake at dawn. About crystal waterfalls, with salmon leaping up them, gleaming as though made of solid silver. About warm drops of rain hitting burdock leaves, heavy with dew. He thought for her and Yennefer smiled, listening to his thoughts. The smile quivered on her cheek along with the crescent shadows of her eyelashes.

Between concentric pavement ripples glide errant echoes originating from beyond the Puddled Metropolis. Windowless blocks and pickle-shaped monuments demarcate the boundaries of patternistic cycles from those wilds kissed neither by starlight nor moonlight. Lethal underbrush of razor-like excrescence pierces at the skins of night, crawls with hyperactive sprouts and verminous vines that howl with contempt for the wicked fortunes of Marshland Organizers armed with scythes and hoes and flaming torches who have only succeeded in crafting their own folly where once stood something of glorious and generous integrity. There are familiar whispers under leaves perched upon by flapping moths. They implore the spirit again to heed the warnings of the vines and to not be swayed by the hubris of these organizing opportunists. One is to stop moving at frantic zigzags through gridlocked streets, stop climbing ladders altogether, stop relying on drainage pipes where floods should prevail, stop tapping one’s feet in waiting rooms expecting to be seen and examined and acknowledged. Rather, one is to eschew unseemly fabrications and conceal oneself beneath the surface of leaves—perhaps even inside the droplets of dew—one is, after all, to feel shameful of the form, of all forms, and seek instead to merge with whispers which do not shun or excoriate, for they are otherwise occupied in the act of designating meaning. Yet, what meaning stands beyond the rectitude of angles and symmetry, but rather in wilds among agitated insects and resplendent bogs and malicious spiders and rippling mosses pronouncing doom upon their surroundings? One is said to find only the same degree of opportunism, and nothing greatly edifying that could serve to extend beyond the banalities of self-preservation. But no, surely there is something more than this—there absolutely must be something more, and it is to be found! Forget what is said about ‘opportunism’—this is just a word and, thusly, a distraction. The key issue is that there are many such campaigns of contrivance mounted by the taxonomic self-interest of categories and frameworks ‘who’ only seek primacy and authority over their consumers. The ascription of ‘this’ may thusly be ascribed also with that of ‘this other’ and so it cannot be ‘that precisely’ because ‘this’ contradicts another ‘that other’ with which ‘this other’ surely claims affiliation. Certainly, in view of such limiting factors, there is a frustration that one is bound to feel that the answers available are constrained and formulaic and insufficient and that one is simply to accept the way of things as though they are defined by the highest of mathematics and do not beget anything higher. One is, thusly, to cease in one’s quest for unexplored possibility. The lines have been drawn, the contradictions defined and so one cannot expect to go very far with these mathematical rules and boundaries in place. There are ways out: one might assume the value of an imaginary unit and bounce out of any restrictive quadrant as with the errant echoes against the rippling pavement of this Puddled Metropolis. One will then experience something akin to a bounding and rebounding leap—iterative, but with all subleaps constituting a more sweeping trajectory—outward to other landscapes and null landscapes, inward through corridors and toward the centroid of circumcentric chamber clusters, into crevices and trenches between paradigms and over those mountain peaks of abstruse calculation.

The Leaf by Maisie Aletha Smikle Am sometimes green Am sometimes yellow Am sometimes brown And sometimes black I shade the Amazon I cushion the ground I feed hungry mouths And feed the soil Am kind always giving Never asking anything in return I retain dew to keep you cool I excrete oxygen so you may breathe I give I only give I am a giver A tree with all its branches is naked without me I clothe the tree to hide its shame In shades of green In shades of yellow And many shades in between In Spring I bloom In Summer am scorch In Winter I freeze In the Fall I fall to crown the surface of the ground My aim is to please I bloom to give you joy Am scorched so that I may fall To moisten the soil and make it fertile To cushion the ground For another round Always giving Never taking Tree branches unclothe Naked without their leaves Bare ground exposed Without unfallen leaves Compelling you to leave Leaves sustain and leaves maintain Leaves leave you living Always giving while taking nothing

Let us Let us fall in love and be romantics once again, Let us kiss our desires again and again, Let me pursue my feelings in your beautiful eyes, Let us dive into them and feel the love that lies beyond these eyes, Let us wear our emotions all over us, To feel the kiss of love all over us, Let us become the daylight and spread everywhere, Or maybe in that secret somewhere where your beauty is everywhere, Let me love you now and love you forever, And let your heart confess it has felt the kiss of the true lover, My darling Irma, let our love be the only event in our lives, And let us only grow being a part of our beautiful love lives, Let you be the summer day that never ends, And let all my beginnings in your beautiful eyes find their ends, Let me belong to you just like the Moon belongs to the sky, Let us create a world where there is only your and my love’s sky, Let your feelings like the scent of the rose sink into my senses, And then let us love each other with all our senses, Let us reside in some quiet corner together, Where there is only one sound, that of our two hearts beating together, Let us travel together from our today into our every tomorrow, And carry our love into every moment that represents every tomorrow, Let us walk through the corridors of time, And leave the essence of our love as our signature in every moment of time, Then let me hold your hand and travel somewhere, Because now with our love’s essence residing in time, you shall be everywhere, even in places called somewhere, Let me say it again and again, that my heart beats for you, And then let every moment of time echo with these words, “my darling Irma I love you!” Let the drops of dew reflect your grace, And then let every flower bear the beauty of just one beautiful face, and your grace, Let the moments of time rain over you and me, And then let me find you everywhere within me, Finally let the night conceal us in its dark and mystical shades, And let us transform into love’s most beautiful cascades, only bearing your and my shades, Then let the river of love flow into the valley of promises, And let me find you in beautiful roses and let us now fulfill our promises!

No matter how hard one tried, this island was not a place of leaving easily. It clung to a person like dew. He was still here, always still here

Death rolled in casually, hand in hand with the night. Its purpose hung heavy as a soiled diaper on a lost and starved child. Through the reaching of the fog that crept over the dew-covered ground, its hate slinked along with it and tarnished black every inch it touched. The clouds crawled upon the earth as if the heavens had closed their doors in disgust, leaving mankind to fend for themselves. Even the Gods had turned their backs on the people of Whitwick Gates, the makers of deals with devils.

Let these words sink into your ears,”2 says Christ. In the original it is, put these sayings into your ears, like a man who wants to hide a jewel from a thief and locks it up safe in his chest. Let these words sink; the word must not only fall as the dew that wets the leaves, but as rain which soaks to the roots of the tree, causing it to bear fruit.

In the spring, the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang. In the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed. In the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory. And in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.

The next pair is inspired by my hometown of San Francisco, where I often searched for rare spices and teas in Chinatown. My Chinese tea collection begins with a dark chocolate truffle infused with Lapsang Souchong tea. Cultivated in the Wuyi mountain region in China, the tea leaves are dried over pinewood fires, which give the leaves a smoky, aromatic flavor." Finding Lauro in the crowd, Celina echoed his description. With a smile tugging at her lips, she added, "You might find it reminiscent of the rich earth around Vesuvius, moist with morning dew." Bringing his hand to his lips, Lauro sent her a happy kiss across the crowd. "Also from the Wuyi Mountains of northern Fujian comes oolong tea, which can be fruity, green, or sweet. This oolong is a sweet, roasted woody version.

The rustling of leaves under the feet in woods and under hedges. The crumping of cat-ice and snow down wood rides, narrow lanes and every street causeways. Rustling through a wood, or rather rushing while the wind hallows in the oak tops like thunder. The rustles of birds wings startled from their nests, or flying unseen into the bushes. The whizzing of larger birds over head in a wood, such as crows, puddocks, buzzards &c. The trample of roburst wood larks on the brown leaves, and the patter of Squirrels on the green moss. The fall of an acorn on the ground, the pattering of nuts on the hazel branches, ere they fall from ripeness. The flirt of the ground-larks wing from the stubbles, how sweet such pictures on dewy mornings when the dew flashes from its brown feathers.

two consciousnesses face to face, living people who acknowledge each other, each demonstrating to the other that they are there, without one killing the other, and the other one has no need to run away, not like animals, each one needing the other, a struggle which leaves a place for the weak, the loser, attached to life he stays and becomes a servant, and he wins, he is told that he has won, but the master can see in his servant only an object, which means he has no one facing him to acknowledge his consciousness, whereas the servant sees in his master the perfect form of the self, an authentic being, this being deigns to look at him, it is enough for him, he sets to work, and he can contemplate his own self in the fruits of his labour, his labour and a master, a false master, it was a fine thing, except that no one foresaw that the masters would begin killing in earnest, return of the herd! Spineless cretins whom the herd are already quietly driving to the edge of the abyss while all the time telling them that some blessing or other mingles with the mountain dew.

As things so often are in fairytales, the world seemed to order itself to our story, so that our pounding hooves echoed under clear, azure skies and gentle breezes tossed out horses’ manes in picturesque curls and ripples. It was almost as if the dew encrusted leaves and grasses and the heady scent of wildflowers were all singing the same song. “Victory,” they sang. “Victory.” And I was a fool because part of me was beguiled by their song, and I believed it.

When he gave the floor a few desultory sweeps, the boards gleamed. Ariadne soon stopped scrubbing and gazed about, marvelling. Barely a quarter hour had elapsed before he collapsed in the armchair, looking peaky. Grudgingly, I made a pot of tea and brought him a cup along with one of the apricot buns left over from supper, for I couldn’t deny that he’d wrought a marvellous change upon the place and felt it only fair to show some appreciation, but also he kept swearing that he would never rise from the chair again if he was not granted some relief from the burden of his exhaustion. He gave me one of his loveliest smiles as he took the tea, green eyes glinting like dewed leaves when the sun strikes them, all quarrels forgotten. “Thank you, Em. You have saved me.” “Oh, shush,” I said, rendered a little breathless in spite of myself. “Just think,” he said, “if we marry, in all your life you will never have to worry about mice again.” I rolled my eyes. “You found mice, did you.” “In the back of the cupboard.” Ariadne let out a yelp and started away from the kitchen. I affected unconcern even as a shudder went through me. I’m embarrassed to admit that there is nothing in the world that disturbs me more than mice. I refilled Wendell’s tea, and he looked very smug. “You missed a few spiders,” I said, to offset the indulgence. “Just there.” “Spiders?” He sipped his tea. “I never interfere with spiders. I quite like them, in fact. They are tidy beasts who keep a place clean. Which is more than I can say about some people.

Those whom love has not given wings cannot fly the cloud of appearances to see the magic world in which Selma`s spirit and mine existed together in that sorrowfully happy hour. Those whom Love has not chosen as followers do not hear when Love calls. This story is not for them. Even if they should comprehend these pages, they would not be able to grasp the shadowy meanings which are not clothed in words and do not reside on paper, but what human being is he who has never sipped the wine from the cup of love, and what spirit is it that has never stood reverently before that lighted altar in the temple whose pavement is the hearts of men and women and whose ceiling is the secret canopy of dreams? What flower is that on whose leaves the dawn has never poured a drop of dew; what streamlet is that which lost its course without going to the sea?

following the plotlines with ease. In moments of stillness, when I’d usually mindlessly scroll, I opted instead to stare out of windows or to close my eyes. I went for slow, meandering walks, stopping to touch the trunks of trees, or to marvel at dew-covered leaves, or to smile directly into the faces of flowers. I was unbearably smug.

Hidden Joys Is it not surprising how joy comes? As effortless as leaves drinking dew. Patiently waiting for us to acknowledge her. Much of life is filled with moments of joy we often ignore. Perhaps adorned in the hearts of those we love. Hiding in ' the tenderness of things'. Look at this, how our hearts are most alive in quiet moments. Isn't that plain joy? It only seeks to be seen in the purity of love.

Furl your banners and hang you heads,” muttered the wind, “this is no time for tourney. Cast into my four arms those gaudy trappings, for what can cause you joy, O trees, at such a time as this?” “This rising Sun and the long bright bright day,” the beech cried out. “The setting Sun and the cool dark night,” the oak said quietly. “And the rain,” the pine murmured gratefully, “wit it’s gentle fingers finer than my needles.” The maple was silent. The wind spun around it’s rough gray trunk and sent a shower of gold into the sky. “O wind,” the maple said, “the side passage of the year from cold to heat, from growing to fruition, from birds nesting to their migrations, is joy enough for us. Let us celebrate it, O wind, before the snow lays it’s white fingers on us and bids us be silent for a time.” The maple spoke wistfully, golden leaves tumbling down the day at every word. “You speak of memories,” the wind went on. “I who have roamed the earth have seen suffering and cruelty and sorrow. You who stand so still in one place always must believe me.” “For you, O wind, perhaps it has been a year of sad revelation,” the beech said softly; “but for us it has been a year like all others—rising suns and waxing moons, rains and dews and storms, and the seasons marching in orderly procession around us.” “Ah,” the wind wailed, clutching at gold and scarlet and green, “how can you hold those banners high when evil still stalks the earth?” The trees quivered and were silent. The wind raged around them, and his fury brought down cascades of leaves, which he sent hurling over the dry ground. “We hold our banners high in faith, O wind,” the pine spoke out, lifting its voice so the wind would hear, “emblem for this brief moment of the pledge we have made. We have heard before of these things that you would tell us. The stars have told us many strange tales, and the moon has told us even stranger ones. But we must still be faithful.” “To what?” moaned the wind, annoyed that his words could not deter the trees from their galliard ways. “To the everlasting right at the heart of things,” replied the maple. “Evil has but a little day, O wind, and good has a thousand.” The banners were fading and falling, and the wind laughed to himself that the brave words of the trees must be as thin and fleeting. He stamped and reached high, swept over the ground and leapt aloft, while leaves fell in a gilded shower about him. Cheering at his triumph, he looked through bare branches to the sky, heavy with scudding clouds. Oak, maple, beech were silenced now. Dark trunks stood rooted in the earth, crossed boughs were held uplifted to the heavens. The pine swayed slowly, it’s heraldic blazon of sable and vert gleaming darkly. “Look higher, wind, than those bare boughs. Look wider.” The wind looked, and there, outlined against the sunset gold, on every twig tight buds were tipping: the crimson secret of the oak, the enscaled cradle of the maple, the little sheathed sword of the beech. “Faith, my friend,” the pine said in a whisper, “faith has the last word always.” The wind bowed low, low enough to kiss the leaves that swirled around him in a moment of ecstasy; then the wind went on his way down the archway of the year that was luminous with promise.

Amidst the tranquil dawn, the sun’s gentle rays breathe life into dew-kissed leaves, a reminder that beauty awakens in subtlety.

them. But I often ask myself to what it all goes.--I learn to love my boys. I kill in them all the bad I can. I nourish in them all the good I can. I send them across the borders of manhood--and they leave me, and most likely I hear nothing more of them. And I say to myself: 'My life is like a wind. It blows and will cease.' But something says in reply: 'Wouldst thou not be one of God's winds, content to blow, and scatter the rain and dew, and shake the plants into fresh life, and then pass away and know nothing of what thou hast done?' And I answer: 'Yes, Lord.

BETWEEN SEASONS Today I bring you cold chrysanthemums, white as absence, long-stemmed as my grief. I stand before your grave, a few unfallen leaves overhead, the sucking mud beneath. What survives best are chrysanthemums in a month which arrives austere as grief. The hearty blossoms persevere, unfallen. Suffering even snow, they flourish beneath. You walked in mornings among chrysanthemums, and bowed to them as if to hear their grief. Your sleeves grew damp from brushing unfallen dew. A drop lay by your eye, and one beneath. Truest to your nature were chrysanthemums, brilliant while first snows descended like grief. You watched them from your bed, your heart unfallen, steadfast through winter, and then you slipped beneath. What is it they told you, once, the chrysanthemums? It made you sigh, Ah, Grief! Who savors you more than us, the unfallen, long after we’ve forgotten the fallen beneath?

In all things there is beauty. In the glint of dew clinging to the strands of a spider’s web; in the way the setting sun winks off shards of broken glass; in the rainbow forming in the soap suds in a sink full of dirty dishes; in a blade of grass which manages to force its way, with patience and time, through the all too willing grasp of sidewalk cement. It is in the faded brown of leaves, turning, twisting against their fate, as they fall to the ground, light and dry as brittle bones, and in the bare, thin-tipped branches, denuded by a change in season. It is in the way a stranger’s laughter cradles you if you let it. It is in the intricate scars of a lover’s back and in our upturned eyes when we ask for forgiveness.

Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss. The language of hunting has a luminous word for such mark-making: 'foil'. A creature's 'foil' is its track. We easily forget that we are track-makers, though, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete - and these are substances not easily impressed. 'Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths visible and invisible, symmetrical or meandering,' writes Thomas Clark in his enduring prose-poem 'In Praise of Walking'. It's true that, once you begin to notice them, you see that the landscape is still webbed with paths and footways - shadowing the modern-day road network, or meeting it at a slant or perpendicular. Pilgrim paths, green roads, drove roads, corpse roads, trods, leys, dykes, drongs, sarns, snickets - say the name of paths out loud and at speed and they become a poem or rite - holloways, bostles, shutes, driftways, lichways, ridings, halterpaths, cartways, carneys, causeways, herepaths.

INSIDE MY EMBRACE   Pulling her closer to me as she sits inside of my embrace beneath the fragrant cool of morning, I warm her legs and arms as her eyes shine like dew over morning clovers, eager to bear the weight of this weary traveler. I kiss her in a way that longs for her love to be made. Caressing her underneath her neck and face I give my soul’s kiss to the side of her face, kissing her again above the eyes, sliding down the bridge of her nose as I find her lips once more.   I calm her growing anxiousness as I reach my hand over her face, she taking my hand to warm her face with. I reach for her lips tasting the sweet nectar from her body and spirit as she takes her time loving me beneath the great red cedar tree that stands furthest from the house. She again kisses me gently having known from the day that we first kissed that I could never get enough of her love. I watch as she lays peacefully in my arms without any disturbance of any kind as a dark slate grey and rifle green flitter above from the leaves of a large alder tree. Seeing her as she is now I am reminded of how still the soul can be when looking at a painting. I now feel as if all of the simple pleasures in life have been granted to me as I watch her wrapped inside of my embrace.

Deep in the wave is a coral grove, Where the purple mullet and gold fish rove, Where the sea flower spreads its leaves of blue That never are wet with the falling dew, But in bright and changeful beauty shine Far down in the deep and glassy brine.

Remind me of the place. The wind breathing through the trees and the sound of coconuts dropping on the mud. Ta-dup ta dup. The hairy mangrove crabs and the turtles. The evening sky looking like a big mash up rainbow with all these colors leaking down on the sea. The fresh smell of fish and sand in the mornings. Cascadura jumping up from the ponds like living clumps of mud. Dew skating down from the big dasheen leaves as if they playing with the sunlight. A horsewhip snake slipping down a guava branch as smooth as flowing water. Cassava pone and seamoss drinks.

If you cannot come, if you fear What music might wind your feet In the moss and migrant roots, What drink will score your throat Like a sky scratched By the claw-end of leaves What wheels will drive you Home at dawn, where the dew-blades Bear up the infancies of light— Then send, in the tremble Of your own cold hand, Regrets only, nothing but regrets.

The dew on the leaves before the sun rises. The silence before the cock crows. The eggshell not yet broken by its chick. Not what is, but what might be.

The Resonance of Honeyed Summer Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence abab, cdcd, efef, gg Synchronous in honeyed summer sings a choir of tremulous birch leaves, A sweet breeze surges south from the mountains to cool down the farm. To a white picket fence, among the honeybees, a steadfast garden cleaves, After blind disregard by a town plow, mended again from winter harm. A sensual scent of new mown meadow, the clash of croquet mallet to ball, A ricochet sings a tin din of two wickets and a knock into a winning stake. By the barn, night owls howl, by day gleeful wee hummingbirds enthrall. The mirth of dipping children as wakes of droning motorboats lap a lake. Bluebirds have woven a love nest in a stilted, rough-hewn, wooden house. By a stonewall wild berries grow swollen from green to a misty blue hue. As we ride bikes beside a hayfield, we rouse the flight of a russet grouse. At dawn a doe and fawn cross our lawn leaving hoof prints upon the dew. In long lemonade days, rocking and sipping on the porch, in our defense, We're in awe of honeyed summertime and the harmony of its resonance. + + +

King and Cross Glistening nighttime dew, and she is walking with me. From the house of red, I hear a child crying. Foxes heading home, their prey hangs from their jaws. And the forest knows, but it won’t share the secret. When the king takes sides, Leaving moral minds; soldiers take their share. Nighthawks seem to sense that now is the time. Deep inside them burns the raging fire of life. He’ll take back what he owns. Death cannot take hold, if I can keep momentum. Fortresses of stone, turn into crystal tears Soothed by southern winds; I’ve found my strength now. And nobody knows, and we must keep their secret. When the king takes sides, Leaving moral minds; soldiers take their share. Nighthawks seem to sense that now is the time. Deep inside them burns the raging fire of life. He’ll take back what he owns. When the king takes sides, Leaving moral minds; soldiers take their share. Nighthawks seem to sense that now is the time. Deep inside them burns the raging fire of life. He’ll take back what he owns.

TO MUSIC, TO BECALM HIS FEVER" CHARM me asleep and melt me so With thy delicious numbers, That, being ravished, hence I go Away in easy slumbers. Ease my sick head And make my bed, Thou power that canst sever From me this ill ; And quickly still, Though thou not kill My fever. Thou sweetly canst convert the same From a consuming fire Into a gentle-licking flame, And make it thus expire. Then make me weep My pains asleep ; And give me such reposes That I, poor I, May think thereby I live and die 'Mongst roses. Fall on me like a silent dew, Or like those maiden showers Which, by the peep of day, do strew A baptim o'er the flowers. Melt, melt my pains With thy soft strains ; That, having ease me given, With full delight I leave this light, And take my flight For heaven.

A few dead leaves fell down on top of her, carrying the scent of dew and the sound of birdsong. Taking

INGINA-A golden shaft of sunlight cut the ghostly tissue of dawn that hung like a timeless web of mist in the rambling thicket at the river's edge. Wild grasses, weeds, and thistles bowed low beneath the weight of an overnight dew, leaving a wet and woven mat of deep greens and October browns along the unkempt nape of a broad terrace rising from the bank. The field stretched out a hundred yards or so to a silvery stand of beech, sugar maple and yellow locust at the base of a sheer granite cliff. A songbird chattered from the forested rim of the field, drawing the soft and steady applause of water pouring over the stone and grassy shallows upstream, and seeming to repeat the ancient Tutelo word for river-tak see ta, tak see ta, tak see ta.

As grief tears the sky at dark, in silence they rain as the flowers of night, soft is their light as morn dew they sit on the leaves..

I stir the simmering potion until it turns a bright, gruesome red, the same shade as Ruby Valentino's lips. But it's too bright, too obvious. Then I remember. I reach into the pocket of my dress, past the spool of thread, to the thing I'm looking for. When I pull it out, the leaves are slightly flattened, but it's still intact: the four-leaf clover given to me by the leprechaun in St. Patrick Town. He said it would bring me luck. And I need it now. I drop the green clover into the potion, and within seconds, the color turns a vibrant, grassy green--reminding me of the damp meadow in St. Patrick Town, freshly dewed with rain. The exact shade I need.

[The curve of your eyes] La courbe de tes yeux fait le tour de mon coeur, Un rond de danse et de douceur, Auréole du temps, berceau nocturne et sûr, Et si je ne sais plus tout ce que j’ai vécu C’est que tes yeux ne m’ont pas toujours vu. Feuilles de jour et mousse de rosée, Roseaux du vent, sourires parfumés, Ailes couvrant le monde de lumière, Bateaux chargés du ciel et de la mer, Chasseurs des bruits et sources des couleurs, Parfums éclos d’une couvée d’aurores Qui gît toujours sur la paille des astres, Comme le jour dépend de l’innocence Le monde entier dépend de tes yeux purs Et tout mon sang coule dans leurs regards. *** The curve of your eyes goes around my heart, A round of dance and sweetness, Halo of time, nocturnal and safe cradle, And if I don’t know any more all that I’ve lived through It’s because I haven’t always been seen by you. Leaves of day and scum of dew, Reeds of the wind, perfumed smiles, Wings covering the world with light, Ships filled with the sky and the sea, Hunters of noises and sources of colours, Perfumes bloomed from a brood of dawns That always lies on the straw of the stars, As the day depends on innocence The whole world depends on your pure eyes And all my blood flows in their looks. Paul Éluard , L’Amour la poésie (1929) Translated by Anne-Charlotte Husson

San Gabriel emerges from the fog laden with dew. The clouds of the night slept over the village searching for the warmth of the people. Now the sun is about to come out and the fog rises slowly, rolling up its sheet, leaving white strips over the rooftops. A gray steam, hardly visible, rises from the trees and the wet earth, attracted by the clouds, but it vanishes immediately. Then the black smoke comes from the kitchens, smelling of burned oak, covering the sky with ashes. In the distance the mountains are still in shadow. [ At daybreak ] Wherever you look in Luvina, it’s a very sad place. You’re going there, so you’ll find out. I would say it’s the place where sadness nests. Where smiles are unknown as if people’s faces had been frozen. And if you like, you can see that sadness just any time. The breeze that blows there moves it around but never takes it away. It seems like it was born there. And you can almost taste and feel it, because it’s always over you, against you and because it’s heavy like a large plaster weighing on the living flesh of the heart. The people from there say that when the moon is full they clearly see the figure of the wind sweeping along Luvina’s streets, bearing behind it a black blanket; but what I always managed to see when there was a moon in Luvina was the image of despair - always. [ Luvina ]

Aubade" “My love, I fear the silence of your hands.” —Mahmoud Darwish Overnight, my heart, the forest has grown cold and every leaf shivers with the sure knowledge of its fall, shivers yellow and maple-red and mauve, Summer remembered in vermillion dying. When I walk the river now it bears merely the lightest press of feet, my body swaying to keep balance in the whetted breeze. I had to leave you on the absent shore, a warm bloom nesting in the reeds, an unfixed, iridescent eye. How we part only the morning knows, and what we said already dew. Tomorrow after tomorrow we will find the tongue to remember our silences, or borrow words from the night’s vocabulary of sighs. Grief will teach you new names and I will answer, hollow, in drumbeats and echoes, in footsteps and softly closed doors, never looking at you, never back. I place these words now in the vault of sleep before it comes. Before the burial and the blood. Alvin Pang, When the Barbarians Arrive. (Arc Publications 2012)

TWO VOICES I own the dawn! the cockerel claims. The light still loiters with intent to take the night. Wind steals through woods, the democratic dew gives equal weight to everything. A few blank seconds and he starts again. He yawns and voice possesses him. I own all dawns! I stand on dignity! he shouts out, shut in the dark kingdom of his one-room flat. More pained possessive crazed each time he crows he has to wrench his larynx, curl his claws to let that shout surge through him. Glancing out I notice nothing answers except light, whose answer makes the earth's hairs stand on end and shadows fall full-length without a sound. What is the word for wordless, when the ground bursts into crickets? There's a creaking sound like speaking speeded up. A skeleton crawls across leaves, still in its cramped position. one minute stooping on a bending blade rubbing its painful elbows, next minute made of pinged elastic, flying hypertense, speaking in several languages at once. not like a mouth might speak, more like two hands make whispered contact through their finger-ends, like light itself which absent-mindedly brushes the grass and speaks by letting be, but when you duck down suddenly and stare into the startled stems, there's nothing there.

Relationships, like dew on leaves, are delicate and fleeting. We must handle them with caution or else they will vanish.

And to leave the people we meet and the places we visit better than we found them.

Geralt knew that, in moments like this, the enchantress’s telepathic abilities were sharpened and very powerful, so he thought about beautiful matters and beautiful things. About things which would give her joy. About the exploding brightness of the sunrise. About fog suspended over a mountain lake at dawn. About crystal waterfalls, with salmon leaping up them, gleaming as though made of solid silver. About warm drops of rain hitting burdock leaves, heavy with dew. He thought for her and Yennefer smiled, listening to his thoughts. The smile quivered on her cheek along with the crescent shadows of her eyelashes.

This time, before I unroll the note, I bring it closer and inhale deeply. It smells like a forest in the morning when dew still dots the leaves and the mist still swirls around your legs.

Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan, chief of the honorary Dodds men, turned up that Thursday midmorning to raise the dead and rescue Carol Dodds from martyrdom and widowhood first by recruiting her son over a cooked breakfast followed by a warm slice of angel cake both courtesy of her maminlaw who after all knelt at the altar of hospitality, hypocrisy and false modesty, and might’ve welcomed Mac after all these years for Jim’s sake, or, equally, spiked Mac’s tea with oven cleaner for Jim’s sake, then fed his bones to the white dog that patrolled their street and one night last November got loose and tore up a family of foxes on Carol’s lawn who’d been at her bins for months, leaving Carol to find the magpies first thing, picking through dead leaf, plucking intestines like worms, while she smelled no blood only mulch and dew.

Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan, chief of the honorary Dodds men, turned up that Thursday midmorning to raise the dead and rescue Carol Dodds from martyrdom and widowhood first by recruiting her son over a cooked breakfast followed by a warm slice of angel cake both courtesy of her maminlaw who after all knelt at the altar of hospitality, hypocrisy and false modesty, and might’ve welcomed Mac after all these years for Jim’s sake, or, equally, spiked Mac’s tea with oven cleaner for Jim’s sake, then fed his bones to the white dog that patrolled their street and one night last November got loose and tore up a family of foxes on Carol’s lawn who’d been at her bins for months, leaving Carol to find the magpies first thing, picking through dead leaf, plucking intestines like worms, while she smelled no blood only mulch and dew.

We are white dew drops; If we lay ourselves just as we are On the maple leaves, We are red beads.

The single most notable thing about him is that he often discreetly touches his penis (via his pockets, but we can all see the movements) and then openly touches the door handles, printers, and Nespresso buttons, leaving his penis dew that seeped through the pocket fabric everywhere. Because he’s the boss, there’s no stopping his dick fingers, and that’s why no workplace is ever truly equal.

The longest day of summer the fruit trees all droop in the summer sun and the rose bush dances gently swaying to the rhyme of birds singing I cannot see them but I hear the beautiful melodies and the dove with its majestic elegance in silence porches upon the television arial conducting the small unseen birds scattered in between the green leaves I am the free spirit I am the prisoner of time I am the fountain of youth in an old men's body I am the experience of life I am the eyes that watch in wonder I am the witness of declining values I am the witness of those who suffer I am the thoughts that become the written words I share I am the spark of connection that connects us all I am the lover the sufferer I am the positive energy that inspires and encourages the souls who become tired and lost in life I am the naked soul that the morning dew baptizes and blesses with the strength to help others I love you

I feel the sweet unclosing leaves Refreshing in the limpid dew. I hear the lily sigh. She grieves That I should wait the night for you.

Looking at Sam was fine but it was the tasting I enjoyed most. Like the dew that watered fresh blossoms, Sam’s lips moved and left their mark against my heated skin. His scent of body wash and manliness– too inviting– left a delicious taste behind leaving me to desire the more I know I’ll never get.

End of autumn - heavy frost and dew; At dawn, I rise and go to the hidden valley. Yellow leaves cover stream and bridge, In the empty village, just ancient trees. Cold flowers are scattered, each alone, Hidden stream breaks off, and reappears. My heart’s plans are long forgotten now, What can it be that startles the deer?

Oh! the deep subtlety and cunning craftiness of the enemy! calling, in the name of our God, for enlargement of our confidence in him, that we might the more blindly follow on in the course of his deceivableness. And, Oh! the hollowness of our own hearts, which drank in flattery and seduction, and persuaded us we were drinking in the sincere milk of the word, and growing in love and in meekness. And, Oh! the awful justice, and yet redeeming grace, of our God, who, because of our secret pride, which led to a craving after something more than the gentle dew of the Spirit, morning by morning, gave us, indeed, meat to our lust, by leaving us under a spiritual power, which was supernatural and sweet to the taste, but afterwards wormwood and ashes; and yet remembering his mercy, repented him of his anger, and snatched us as brands from the burning. Surely we have so much of glorious revelation made plain to us, that we can feed upon it in peace and patience, with thanksgiving; and need not to cultivate an unhealthy appetite after crude and novel views, in which we can neither find rest nor edification.

My “boyfriend” at the time (let’s call him Mike) was an emotionally withholding, conventionally attractive jock whose sole metric for expressing affection was the number of hours he spent sitting platonically next to me in coffee shops and bars without ever, ever touching me. To be fair, by that metric he liked me a lot. Despite having nearly nothing in common (his top interests included cross-country running, fantasy cross-country running [he invented it], New England the place, New England the idea, and going outside on Saint Patrick’s Day; mine were candy, naps, hugging, and wizards), we spent a staggering amount of time together—I suppose because we were both lonely and smart, and, on my part, because he was the first human I’d ever met who was interested in touching my butt without keeping me sequestered in a moldy basement, and I was going to hold this relationship together if it killed me. Mike had only been in “official” relationships with thin women, but all his friends teased him for perpetually hooking up with fat chicks. Every few months he would get wasted and hold my hand, or tell me I was beautiful, and the first time I tried to leave him, he followed me home and said he loved me, weeping, on my doorstep. The next day, I told him I loved him, too, and it was true for both of us, probably, but it was a shallow, watery love—born of repetition and resignation. It condensed on us like dew, only because we waited long enough. But “I have grown accustomed to you because I have no one else” is not the same as “Please tell me more about your thoughts on the upcoming NESCAC cross-country season, my king.

When you heard Kazune play, it summoned up visible, tangible scenery. Light shining down among the trees, wet with morning dew. Drops of water sparkling on the tips of leaves, then dripping down. One morning, repeated over and over again. A vibrancy and solemnity born fresh and new.

The rain made the stonework glisten, falling heavier by the moment. There’s a word. Glisten. Silver chains on holy trees, the gloss on lips for kissing, dew on spiderwebs, sweat on breasts. Glisten, glisten, listen. Say it until the meaning bleeds away. Even without meaning it stays true. The rain made the grey stone glisten. Not quite a sparkle, not quite a gleam, but a glisten to the soaked cobbles, a gurgle from gutters where the dirt ran and leaves twirled in fleeting rapids, bound for dark and hungry throats, swallowed past stone teeth.

Aubade" “My love, I fear the silence of your hands.” —Mahmoud Darwish Overnight, my heart, the forest has grown cold and every leaf shivers with the sure knowledge of its fall, shivers yellow and maple-red and mauve, Summer remembered in vermillion dying. When I walk the river now it bears merely the lightest press of feet, my body swaying to keep balance in the whetted breeze. I had to leave you on the absent shore, a warm bloom nesting in the reeds, an unfixed, iridescent eye. How we part only the morning knows, and what we said already dew. Tomorrow after tomorrow we will find the tongue to remember our silences, or borrow words from the night’s vocabulary of sighs. Grief will teach you new names and I will answer, hollow, in drumbeats and echoes, in footsteps and softly closed doors, never looking at you, never back. I place these words now in the vault of sleep before it comes. Before the burial and the blood.

In one of the sermons I remember best, Mother Elfilda compared the Virgin Mary to an onyx, the precious stone that opens up to receive a drop of dew when the sun shines on it. After nine months it opens again and another onyx falls out, leaving the original stone unchanged. Mary remained pure, untouched, even as God forced Joseph to wed Mary.

Solution: To connect with the Kingdom of the World, pretend you are a tree, an animal, a stone, or a flower. What kind of spirit would you have? How would you move or stay rooted? What feelings or thoughts would you have? Go for a walk every day, even if it is only a short one. Notice the dew on the leaves. Search for rainbows when it rains. Watch the clouds move. Admire them. Without clouds, there is no rain, there is no life. Look at the bees. Thank them for their work when they cross your path. Without bees, there is no pollination; there is no life. Bees are disappearing. Talk to them about this. The more you observe and interact with nature, the more you’ll understand the connectedness of all the elements of the world, and the more nature will talk to you and heal you.

XI. Almost Out Of The Sky" Almost out of the sky, half of the moon anchors between two mountains. Turning, wandering night, the digger of eyes. Let's see how many stars are smashed in the pool. It makes a cross of mourning between my eyes, and runs away. Forge of blue metals, nights of stilled combats, my heart revolves like a crazy wheel. Girl who have come from so far, been brought from so far, sometimes your glance flashes out under the sky. Rumbling, storm, syclone of fury, you cross above my heart without stopping. Wind from the tombs carries off, wrecks, scatters your sleepy root. The big trees on the other side of her, uprooted. But you, cloudless girl, question of smoke, corn tassel. You were what the wind was making with illuminated leaves. Behind the nocturnal mountains, white lily of conflagration, ah, I can say nothing! You were made of everything. Longing that sliced my breast into pieces, it is time to take another road, on which she does not smile. Storm that buried the bells, muddy swirl of torments, why touch her now, why make her sad. Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything, without anguish, death, winter waiting along it with their eyes open through the dew.

Aubade" “My love, I fear the silence of your hands.” —Mahmoud Darwish Overnight, my heart, the forest has grown cold and every leaf shivers with the sure knowledge of its fall, shivers yellow and maple-red and mauve, Summer remembered in vermillion dying. When I walk the river now it bears merely the lightest press of feet, my body swaying to keep balance in the whetted breeze. I had to leave you on the absent shore, a warm bloom nesting in the reeds, an unfixed, iridescent eye. How we part only the morning knows, and what we said already dew. Tomorrow after tomorrow we will find the tongue to remember our silences, or borrow words from the night’s vocabulary of sighs. Grief will teach you new names and I will answer, hollow, in drumbeats and echoes, in footsteps and softly closed doors, never looking at you, never back. I place these words now in the vault of sleep before it comes. Before the burial and the blood.

To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep.

IT WAS CHRISTMAS night, the eve of the Boxing Day Meet. You must remember that this was in the old Merry England of Gramarye, when the rosy barons ate with their fingers, and had peacocks served before them with all their tail feathers streaming, or boars’ heads with the tusks stuck in again—when there was no unemployment because there were too few people to be unemployed—when the forests rang with knights walloping each other on the helm, and the unicorns in the wintry moonlight stamped with their silver feet and snorted their noble breaths of blue upon the frozen air. Such marvels were great and comfortable ones. But in the Old England there was a greater marvel still. The weather behaved itself. In the spring, the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang. In the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed. In the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory. And in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.

All quiet along the Potomac,” they say, “Except, now and then, a stray picket Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro, By a rifleman hid in the thicket. ’Tis nothing—a private or two, now and then, Will not count in the news of the battle; Not an officer lost—only one of the men Moaning out, all alone, his death-rattle.” * * * * * * All quiet along the Potomac to-night, Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming; Their tents, in the rays of the clear autumn moon Or the light of the watch-fire, are gleaming. A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind Through the forest-leaves softly is creeping; While stars up above, with their glittering eyes, Keep guard—for the army is sleeping. There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread, As he tramps from the rock to the fountain, And thinks of the two in the low trundle-bed Far away in the cot on the mountain. His musket falls slack—his face, dark and grim, Grows gentle with memories tender, As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep— For their mother—may Heaven defend her! The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then, That night, when the love yet unspoken Leaped up to his lips—when low-murmured vows Were pledged to be ever unbroken. Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes, He dashes off tears that are welling, And gathers his gun closer up to its place, As if to keep down the heart-swelling. He passes the fountain, the blasted pine-tree, The footstep is lagging and weary; Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light, Toward the shade of the forest so dreary. Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves? Was it moonlight so suddenly flashing? It looked life a rifle—“Ha! Mary, good-by!” And the life-blood is ebbing and plashing. All quiet along the Potomac to-night, No sound save the rush of the river; While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead— The picket’s off duty forever!

I didn’t care if the morning dew was seeping into my blankets. I wanted sleeeep. “Shad, that includes you.” “I’m sorry, I can’t leave my blankets right now,” I muttered through the cloth. “They have accepted me as one of their own, and if I leave now, our relationship will be forever ruined. I must commune with them a while longer.

I wonder what would happen if the days were not pushed? What would happen if the time flowed in its natural sequence? The sky edging from darkness to gray, rising like a tide of light, pushing the flotsam of cloud upward. And then the sun’s rim, liquid gold, the slant of light through twigs and leaf. What would happen if you watched time’s river rise and flow, lifting you on its back and carrying you on its crest, until, lying back, you rested on the receding light, languishing in the slow pools of afternoon, the tips of the firs trembling and lifting, the ropes of birch leaves swaying in the light like sea kelp. To the west, the evening glow would linger, holding on to color. What if you could watch until the last drops spilled from the edge and then you came to know the night? Oh, but what would be served by such a life? Observation. Contemplation. Deliberation. What if your life came unplugged, disconnected, out of sync with the rest of the world? What if you rode this planet on one full circle round its star paying attention to light and plants and water? Seeing the way rain gathers in puddles or dew beads on grass, noticing the day violets open under the firs or ants appear in the bathroom? You could, you know. Shut off the bells. You could cut loose, unplug, begin. You could improve the nick of time.

Nature Thou Art Beautiful Tiny waterfalls tumbling down elegant slopes of smoothly eroded treacherous rocks..... Trees magnificently and beautifully displayed. Their branches sheltering little springs that sprout from beneath. Soft clouds beckon from above. Like wool blankets, hovering over trees, mountains, hills, cliffs, caves and plains. Moistening hilltops, freshly fallen leaves, trees, grass, valleys and meadows with their heavenly dew. Wind hearkens it's ears, to the voice of the One who speaks the language of the winds. The winds obey and swaying breeze gently rock nature sweetly, to slumber..... The stars shine, the moon is bright and it's a starry night. O slumber thou art indeed sweet. O nature's lullabies have rocked me to sleep... Zzzz... and the night is spent.... "Hello!" greets the Sun. "I'm here to start all over again!

It smells like a forest in the morning when dew still dots the leaves and the mist still swirls around your legs. But it also smells like the ocean breeze at night, freeing, yet cloying, from the unknown that lies within the darkness.

Highlanders, driving their "creagh" toward Balquhidder, passed, their moccasin-clad feet leaving as little impress on the mist as they had left in life upon the tussocks of bent-grass. They urged the shadowy cattle with the ponts of their Lochaber axes; and last of all, wrapped in his plaid, his thick hair curling close about his hard-lined features, passed one I knew at once by his great length of arm and red beard, on which the damp hung in a frosty dew, just as it hung upon the coats of the West Highland kyloes that he drove before him on the rode. Though for two hundred years he had slept well in the lone graveyard of the deserted church beside Loch Voil, he seemed to know the road as perfectly as he had known it in his old foraying days. As he passed he moved his target forward and his hand stole to his sword, as if he recognised one of his ancient foes. Then he was swallowed up by the same mist that had protected him so often in his life.

SONG Shall I love you like the wind, love, That is so fierce and strong, That sweeps all barriers from its path And reeks not right or wrong? The passion of the wind, love, Can never last for long. Shall I love you like the fire, love, With furious heat and noise, To waken in you all love's fears And little of love's joys? The passion of the fire, love, Whate er it finds: destroys. I will love you like the stars, love, Set in the heavenly blue, That only shine the brighter After weeping tears of dew; Above the wind and fire, love, They love the ages through! And when this life is o'er, love, With all its joys and jars, We'll leave behind the wind and fire To wage their boisterous wars— Then we shall only be, love, The nearer to the stars!

The air had that sweet green smell you get before the leaves begin their turn toward autumn. Dew on the ground, everything shone and dazzled. Like walking inside a kaleidoscope—every shade of green you can imagine, and blue sky beyond, tiny birds hopping everywhere.

The Convict's Arrival" "In transit storms as I set sailing, Like a bold mariner my coast did steer, Sydney Harbour was my destination, That cursed harbour at length drew near; I then joined banquet in congratulation On my safe arrival from the briny sea; But alas! alas! I was mistaken Twelve years transported to Moreton Bay. Early one morning as I carelessly wandered, By the Brisbane waters I chanced to stray, I saw a prisoner sadly bewailing, While on the sunbeaming banks he lay. He said, I have been a prisoner at Port MacQuarie, At Norfolk Island and Emu Plain, At Castle Hill and cursed Towngabbie And at all those places I've worked in chains. But of all the places of condemnation, In each penal station of New South Wales, Moreton Bay I found no equal, For excessive tyranny each day prevails. Early in the morning as the day is dawning, To trace from heaven the morning dew, Up we are started at a moment's warning, Our daily labour for to renew. Our overseers and superintendents All these cursed tyrants language we must obey, Or else at the triangles our flesh is mangled, That is our wages at Moreton Bay. For three long years I've been beastly treated; Heavy irons each day I wore, My poor back from flogging has been lacerated, And oftimes painted with crimson gore. Like the Egyptians or ancient Hebrews, We were sorely oppressed by Logan's yoke, Till kind providence came to our assistance And gave this tyrant his fatal stroke. Yes, he was hurried from that place of bondage Where he thought he would gain renown, But a native black, who lay in ambush Gave this monster his fatal wound. Now that I've got once more to cross the ocean, And leave this place called Moreton Bay, Where many a man from downright starvation Lies mouldering today beneath the clay. Fellow prisoners be exhilarated, And your former sufferings don't bear in mind, For it's when from bondage you are extricated We will leave those tyrants far, far behind.

Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself, through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and snuffles, romance only sighs.

You know of a girl and her apple,” The old woman's voice is steady, cutting through the noise. A patient presence that ensnares even the attention of the trees, their branches and thinning leaves stilling as the tongues below them do, too. “Or some version of it. You know of the snake, wise and guiding. The 'me too' and 'I know the way because I've walked the path' in its hiss and slither. But you do not know the tree itself.” And her story begins. You do not know the tree itself, but once you did. Once, all did. Every house had an altar and there the pillar sat. But, by the time the books were written, they found her impossible to erase, so they took her name and called her nothing but an object. It is no accident that the fruit and the snake found home in a tree. Just as it is no accident that the tree becomes a stationary fixture. But, surely, it, too was just as breathing, just as alive. As the old woman in red speaks, the children's very imaginations dance wildly around her blaze, some primal knowing stirring deep within. They meant to bury her, but like most of the stories they tried to eliminate through the permanence of ink and binding of pages, they hadn't realized she became a seed. A dew drop on all of our own spiderwebs, if we care to listen. The more you listen, the more you hear. You see. You feel. And the more you come to know… -Excerpt from “Her True Name: A Story from the Grandmother Tree” – featured in Asherah: Roots of the Mother Tree.

Autumn Shimmer" In the heart of autumn, in the season of falling leaves, when golden foliage swirls like forgotten dreams, sadness falls upon the withering trees, but you shimmer like a beautiful love breeze. The world grows silent beneath a fading sun, Yet you rise in my heart — my dawn, my only sun. In autumn when everything withers, Petals fall like broken feathers Yet you appear, a single blooming rose, gorgeous and radiant, heaven knows. The air grows colder, memories freeze in pain, yet your presence brings spring once again. My hope never dies — you are the reason, you are the breath of life in a dying season. Your gentle touch soothes my soul with ease, In the heart of autumn, you shimmer like a beautiful love breeze. Brimming with the vibrant colors of life. A flower that never fades, among the parched, fallen autumn leaves, you are the only beautiful rose — delicate, divine, and dewy. Thirsty autumn drinks nectar from your embrace. Upon the wilted dry yellow leaves, you are the dew of God’s grace. Autumn withers golden leaves, but you shimmer like a beautiful love breeze. You shimmer like a beautiful love breeze.